


Sweet Dreams Though the Guns Are Booming

by OrionLady



Category: NCIS: Los Angeles
Genre: Adrift at Sea, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blood and Injury, Broken Bones, Families of Choice, Gen, Gunshot Wounds, Hurt/Comfort, I almost put 'Canon Typical Violence' but hmmm this is, I wrote about whales and it made me cry: a true story by Orion, Implied/Referenced Torture, It happens offscreen because I am a Baby, Missions Gone Wrong, Near Death Experiences, Perhaps much worse than canon..., Platonic Relationships, Team as Family, Temporary Character Death, Trust Issues, aka Sam and Callen learn to communicate, blink and you'll miss it supernatural elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-22
Updated: 2021-02-02
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:33:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 34,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27676094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OrionLady/pseuds/OrionLady
Summary: Callen has things he needs to say to his partner, even if Sam refuses to listen. He begins to realize that something between them went off the rails, long before this epic disaster of a mission. His only hope is that he gets to say them before it’s over…before they’re both gone.Callen, Sam, and the end of the line.
Relationships: G Callen & Sam Hanna
Comments: 18
Kudos: 40





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This started as a scene idea way back in March that I fought off for months, like, ‘that's too sad…I can’t write this.’ Then in late August I made the mistake of listening to Jess Ray’s “What Have We Found Ourselves In” while sad one night. By the third verse, this entire thing was born and plotted. Then I got angry about Sam pushing Callen away in the latest season, listened to a lot of Fernando Velazquez, made myself cry, and welp – here we are. 
> 
> It would be _super_ generous to call this a case fic, more themed towards exploring character dynamics by using a very cruddy situation, but there is some Mystery Intrigue™ as I'm incapable of leaving it out apparently. (Sorry Deeks isn't conscious for most of this! I promise I'll write him in more next time!) 
> 
> Quotes and title are taken from _All Quiet on the Western Front_. 
> 
> Enjoy!

‘Maybe in one hundred years, one million laughs, one million tears  
We will have a clearer view – this wasn’t about me and you.  
See, this was written long before and carries on after we’re gone,  
This story that we found ourselves in…  
What have we found ourselves in?’

“What Have We Found Ourselves In” ~ Jess Ray

G Callen falls in love with a lilac blossom on a sunny Tuesday afternoon, in that trapeze suspension right before the sun touches the horizon.

It’s a purple lilac, faded from being flown in a sea gull’s mouth far away from land. Starbursts of fuchsia and diluted lavender line the flower, with tiny blossoms rising in a crest along a stem so green that it makes Callen’s eyes sting. The colour is ice after an eternity in the desert of this place, though he’s never been surrounded by so much water in his life. It hurts more than any wound.

_Water, water everywhere…_

Water, as it turns out, is not their problem.

Callen ignores the tableau of it all for one fleeting moment, his heart so full of love and ennui for this flower that he almost chokes on it. Almost adds more salt to what has already caked to his blistered skin. The seagull hovers in the air for a moment while riding a current of air, as if to better allow Callen’s eyes time to adjust and soak in this flower and the orphic things it makes him feel. His heart is a jar full of pennies, shaken around in glittering spectacle. The sting in his eyes becomes something that he can’t ignore, and with a nauseous upheaval of regret, he closes them.

He’s not even sure why a sea gull would need a flower. For a nest, perhaps? To woo a lady sea gull?

“G? Hey, G—you with me?”

When Callen opens his eyes, the bird is gone. And then he does cry, one small bread crumb of a tear fallen before he even registers it. He’s left so many bread crumbs over the years, with very few following them deep into the woods of his shaken conception of the world. Just one person, really.

“G, you’re scaring me.”

Some bottom-of-the-barrel reserve is left in him enough to suck in a rattling breath and reply, “Get in line.”

A massive gust of air, a sigh, passes over him, in perfect time with the long shadow cast across his face. “You don’t sound so good.”

“Yeah?” Callen quirks a brow, swallowing against the glass in his throat. “Well at least I look better ‘an you.”

Sam’s eyes are dark, even darker, somehow, by the cloudless spring day. The slanted angle of the sun’s setting casts his brown irises in apse-like relief, grooved with gold and hints of emerald. Callen knows every tick of his partner, from the scar behind his right ear to the way he favours his left knee on cold mornings. Callen knows by the forty-five degree angle wrinkle, creasing Sam’s eyebrow on one side, that he’s not just worried.

He’s reaching the end of a short tether, about to lurch from its yank on his strategy-spinning mind.

With Callen on his back, there’s just enough room for Sam to kneel next to him, if he braces one foot against the end of the bright yellow dinghy. Rubber squeaks in protest of Sam’s palm while he squirms to get comfortable or at least to shift into a position for better assessment of Callen’s face.

Callen, for his part, zeroes in on the gauche splint around Sam’s right shin, the one so matted with blood from where bone previously poked out that he’s shocked Sam is conscious at all. In a way…in a way G supposes it makes sense. They’ve both been in and out—this is it. They’ve slept through the second act only to wake at the same time for the final scene.

G gazes at Sam, without any kind of worry on his face, and Sam gazes at G, so overwrought by concern that he’s pale with it.

Though Callen parts his lips for a joke, all he says is, “There was a flower.”

Sam still thinks it’s Act II, not realizing they’ve reached the end. His face roils and snares into a thundercloud. He bends and puts a hovering ear to Callen’s chest, inhaling a sharp breath of his own at whatever he hears.

His voice buzzes with tension, though he attempts to sounds normal. “Oh, was there? You should have pointed it out. I did see an albatross go by with a fish just now.”

Callen’s eyes prickle afresh and he shakes his head—carefully. “No, it was a flower. A purple lilac.”

“G…that bird had a clownfish of some sort in its mouth.”

“You’re wrong.”

Sighing, Sam sits back. “Sure, G. It was a beautiful flower and we’re about to be rescued by a full coastguard team in hula skirts.”

A frown steals across Callen’s face like an impudent burglar before he can even think to censor the expression. Sam is dry, sarcastic; he used to put Granger to shame with his snippy comebacks.

But he’s not pessimistic, nor is he one for cynicism.

“Sam?”

At his voice, Sam shoots upright like he’s been slapped. He blinks fast. Their bodies rock in the waves, an undulation underneath Callen’s spine and Sam’s busted knees. They’re both so bruised, they compete with the black fabric in ribbons around Sam’s legs and the tattered shirt hanging off Callen’s shoulders.

“I’m sorry, G. We’re going to be rescued, of course we are.”

Callen shakes his head again, just a twitch of his neck. He’s not upset by Sam’s joke—his attitude is closer than he understands—but that his partner somehow decided he has to lie to Callen about it.

“Sam,” he says again, and this time it’s a whisper. “None of this is your fault.”

Sam’s pupils eclipse his irises for an electrical burn of a moment, zinging up behind Callen’s ribcage. And Sam’s eyes fill with bread crumbs of his own. They’re gone as fast as they come, so fast that Callen wonders if he saw it, more elusive even than the flower.

Then Sam is back in business mode. He takes Callen’s pulse under his jaw. “Look at you, rambling about lilacs while we’re on the job.”

Callen doesn’t have it in him for a comeback and this seems to distress Sam more than the dire events so far.

“G? You feeling lightheaded? Hallucinating?”

Callen reaches up to hook a hand around the fingers on his neck. “No, ‘m fine. Inventory?”

Sam’s face scrunches in a lightning fast move before he’s back.

“Sam?” Callen tries to sit up, but Sam’s heavy palm on his chest keeps him down. “I know you finished taking…taking inventory. How long?”

Their eyes flit over the emergency pack of water bottles, what they haven’t drunk already, and mylar wrapped rations. The one thing they need—a first aid kit—is the one thing they lost in the hectic hours leading up to this. Neither of them has touched the food, too exhausted, queasy, and strung out to keep anything down.

At least Sam’s eyes are back to their usual brown, panic response under control. His hand switches from assessing, though he doesn’t inform Callen of whatever he gathers from his pulse, to comforting. Callen closes his eyes against the cool hand cupping his face. The sun protests this small relief, beating down on their flushed skin. Merciless.

“Sam?”

“Twenty-four hours,” Sam whispers back. “We have maybe a day, Callen. Whoever stocked this dinghy didn’t plan on needing it for very long.”

“A day.”

Above him, Sam sighs again. “…Yeah.”

“We’re not going to make it.”

Sam’s hand shifts to Callen’s forehead—it’s shaking. “I’ll figure something out, G. I promise.”

Callen doesn’t want to open his eyes this time, doesn’t want to see the devastation on Sam’s face, threaded like a counterpoint through the broken melody of his voice. “Sam, you don’t owe me anything. It’s not your fault.”

* * *

_Sixty-two hours earlier:_

There is one singularly profound thing Marty Deeks is good for, every time, that none of the other agents or even Eric can be counted on to do—he always says exactly what everyone else is thinking and no one dares bring up out loud. Especially not with Hetty standing in earshot.

“This couldn’t wait until morning?” he grumbles, the instant his and Kensi’s feet are through the bullpen doors.

“Technically it _is_ morning.” Sam’s comment is met with murmured agreement and yet more grumbles.

Callen reaches behind him to Hetty’s desk and passes Deeks one of the large coffees—black—that he and Sam bought for the others. Kensi, now on Hetty’s left in their rough group huddle circle, blinks blearily at the floor while blowing on her cup. It’s been roughly eighteen minutes since a call woke them up in the dead of night, and yet Kensi still looks crisp in the all-black gear Hetty requested they wear, her long hair done up in a tight, braided bun, and even some mascara on her upper lashes.

Eric stands to Hetty’s right, polar bear pyjamas and all, and for once he looks just as grim as her. In a subversion of the usual, this doesn’t seem to be from the sudden phone call but from whatever he’s loaded on the tablet in his hand. He scowls at it while watching everyone try to look alive.

“Thanks.” Deeks settles in next to Callen, also blowing on his cup. As per Hetty’s instructions, they’re all dressed, but Callen spies an extra-fuzzy patch on Deeks’ chin he missed in the hurried shave. After a sip or two, the detective perks up a bit. “So. What’s so important that you had to wake us up at two-thirty in the morning for this clubhouse meeting?”

Despite the fact that Sam hasn’t ingested so much as a sip of his own coffee, he still somehow manages to be the most awake. “You said you couldn’t tell us over the phone, Hetty. Are we under attack again?”

Hetty shakes her head, uttering her first spoken word since they all congregated in the darkened NCIS office. “Not this time, Mr. Hanna.”

Callen and Sam exchange a quick look, and Callen feels the same nascent dread winching his stomach that is reflected in Sam’s eyes.

“An unsanctioned mission,” Kensi says.

How she guessed the nuances of Hetty’s face with such clarity, Callen doesn’t know, but he’s grateful. Even if it’s a risky mission, he’d rather know up front than when the guns start blazing. Any intel is good intel.

“The mission is not…our jurisdiction, as it were.” Hetty takes a moment to look each of them in the eye. “First, I assume you’ve all heard about the recent tyrant trying to revolt in Taiwan.”

Everyone groans, even Eric.

“What a piece of work,” he says, pushing up his glasses, and Callen nods.

 _That about sums it up_.

Hetty doesn’t react, other than to point a finger at Eric’s tablet. “In a bid to overthrow the current regime in the Philippines, Tuong Torales has taken rather drastic measures to show he means business.”

Then she stops, hesitating, and they all stand up straighter. Hetty doesn’t _hesitate_ or second guess her words with this halted cadence. Ever. Callen’s unease grows, though he keeps his face clear of anything but professional interest and the increasing effects of his coffee in energizing him up to normal speed. Kensi has stopped moving altogether, cup paused halfway to her lips.

Sam finally asks for them. “Hetty, what did he do?”

Eric answers, swivelling the tablet screen to show the face of young girl, maybe sixteen years old. “Torales kidnapped Rhea Carson, the American ambassador’s daughter and good friend of the current governor in that area. She works part time in his administration for extra credit.”

It’s clearly a ransom photo, Rhea’s tearstained face overexposed by a flash camera in a dark cement room, huddled up on the floor, still in her pyjama pants and tank top, hands and mouth duct taped with more layers than are probably needed for such a short, skinny teenager. An ugly mushroom cloud bruise puffs the skin over her left cheek. In the corner, almost out of frame but not quite, is the gun butt of an M16 rifle.

A unison whisper of swearing and mutters and exclamations of dismay plumes around the empty room. Rescuing government leaders is one thing. But kids are another matter altogether and Sam’s face turns stony. No one is sleepy now.

Callen’s eyes whip to Hetty. “Not to sound callous, but why us? What does this have to do with NCIS?”

“Ah. There’s the rub.” Hetty is holding a cup too, but hers carries the whiff of something much stronger than coffee. She uses it to gesture to her chest. “Well, to put it simply—no other agency will do it.”

They all stare at her.

Deeks steps up to the plate again. “Excuse me, am I hearing this right? There are no other American operatives willing to rescue the _American_ ambassador’s _daughter_ from a known homicidal insurgent? What’s up with that?”

Hetty says nothing, but somehow that is far more grating than if she’d spoken or yelled or done anything other than that tired, sad smile. Sam sets his coffee down on the desk in a messy rush, probably because he’d crush it otherwise; his fists are tight at his sides. Callen looks at Hetty and sighs too, seeing the tormented pain behind her otherwise stoic face. He knows the look well, after years of seeing it in the office doorway.

“What’s the catch?” he asks.

“Ambassador Carson reached out, but the CIA and joint chiefs feel it’s a fool’s errand to try and get Rhea back,” Hetty explains. “They banned any military or navy involvement to attempt otherwise. All branches have been ordered to stand down. Whatever happens is up to negotiations now, they feel.”

Deeks snaps off a rude word and everyone just murmurs their agreement. He’s their mouthpiece and right now he’s singing truth, however much their government leaders don’t want to hear it.

“You can’t negotiate with a man like Torales,” says Eric, quiet.

“No.” Sam rubs his chin. “No, you can’t.”

Kensi cants her head in interest. “So I was right. This is a rogue type of mission.”

“Not at all,” says Hetty, surprising them a second time. 

Sam’s face is a jettied whirlwind now. “Hetty, that means we’ve been ordered to stand down too. Any direct involvement in rescuing Rhea would be treason.”

Hetty takes a swig of her not-coffee and waggles a finger once she swallows. “Yes, but we’re not technically navy at all, are we? We’re naval _investigative_ services. Though we serve the military, our little slice of the government pie is not mandated by any kind of elected ranking.”

Eric squints. “What does that mean?”

“It means a colonel or general, anyone promoted by the military, can’t come in here and order you to do something,” says Callen. “Only the secretary of the Navy can, and even then, often a civilian review board is tasked with oversight of her actions.”

“Precisely.” Hetty’s smile dims, and her eyes again rake around the circle. “I got the call personally from Jerome Carson. He’s…an old friend from when we worked together in Vietnam. We are going to simply _investigate_ the situation. If we happen to be in the area with an opportunity to get Rhea safely out, then we’d be negligent not to. Or at least that’s the official version should any superiors find out.”

If Deeks is the filter free voice of what they’re all feeling, then Callen is the team’s realist—and he knows he has to ask the questions they won’t, or perhaps ones they haven’t even thought of yet.

“Hetty…” But he doesn’t want to ask it, suddenly, despite years of working these kinds of cases. “Hetty, how much are they asking for? To get Rhea back?”

The director’s eyes dim too, a little more defeated than they should be. “Nothing. This isn’t a ransom-based kidnapping at all.”

Shock blossoms over Kensi’s face. “Then what does Torales want?”

“For the current governor to give up his bureau and install Torales’ regime as the new ruler.”

Sam paces away from the circle and back, accepting Kensi’s shoulder pat in silence when he walks back. Callen, too, feels the crushing weight of what’s just been handed to them. Impossible odds are an understatement. It feels much like the mission to Mexico—and if that’s their best case scenario, then Callen knows they’ll have to pull a proverbial rabbit out of a hat for the rescue to work at all.

“I can’t ask you to do this.” Hetty’s voice wavers ever so slightly on the last word and she clears her throat.

“Sure you can.” Deeks offers a wink, then a wan smile which brings Hetty’s back to her face. “That’s why you called the best, right?”

Snorting, Kensi whacks his bicep and then squeezes it. “We’re in, Hetty. We’ll get Rhea Carson back.”

Though Kensi and Deeks are seasoned agents, who have lived through unspeakable horrors and survived, they still have a measure of hope and optimism, an unsullied view of their abilities, Callen can’t manage. That he’ll _never_ be able to manage, no matter how many years go by or how many happy endings they add to their poverty-stricken account. Neither can Sam, who catches Callen’s eye again and asks a question with pursed lips. Callen frowns, brows knit.

“Leaving a child behind is wrong…my conscience won’t allow it, not if we can help. I’m in,” says Sam, watching Callen deliberate. “But only if he is.”

And with that, everyone turns to Callen.

The faces of these beloved people, his bothers and sister, his _family_ , who he has bled for and who have given pints of blood for him in return, every speck of it melts away until the only thing Callen feels is a heartbeat in his chest…

It’s against his arm too—for it is not his heartbeat at all.

 _Sam_.

Callen knows he is leaving Anna behind, still trying to get her bearings after being declared a free woman, but he has his own conscience to serve—the only reason for it existing at all being the reason he’ll never leave its instigator behind. Sam magnetized Callen’s soul to give his own moral compass direction, and because of that he refuses to let Sam run into danger without him there to guard his back.

Callen looks straight at Sam, then Hetty. “Let’s do this.”

* * *

_‘Sweet dreams though the guns are booming.’_

_The quote, from a book in high school English Callen never even bothered to finish, flitters around his thoughts in shiny copper fragments. Like someone blew up a fountain full of coins and down they come. Scarlet and rusty brown catch the light, new and old. Pennies of forgot dreams without value to buy any set piece from them. Make a wish…_

_He is here and he is nowhere and he is standing on a beach full of white sand. Not just…not just very yellow or bleached sand—but white. Perfect, snowy, and warm between his bare toes._

_Callen floats, but his dreams aren’t so sweet and the guns have long since stopped booming._

_Blood dots the sand, the ache in his empty hand, with the only working heart in the land—_

_Sweet dreams…ah, sweet dreams…_

_And G Callen is alone._

* * *

It’s one of those things you don’t tell people, especially not your partner before life and death missions in the unsanctioned warzone of terrorist run Taiwan, but Callen’s mind tunnel focuses sometimes. Not in a dangerous way, like a civilian having a gun pointed at them and then drawing a blank on the attacker’s face when giving a statement later; not even in a whimsical, dreamer way. This habit doesn’t impede his job by overriding his mind, a backseat passenger to his consciousness.

But Callen has an almost primal tether to Sam after all these years.

It acts up even when they’re not physically in the same room, sensations narrowing down to their common denominator, parsecs of time compacted into singular images: the flash of Kensi’s hair in the moonlight, Deeks waving two fingers to signal the all clear at the military compound gate, the dancer-like way Sam snaps a man’s neck, lowering him softly to the ground, Deeks’ wedding ring bulging under his black glove, a brilliant shard of glinting alabaster when Kensi bares her teeth in frustration at having to quietly knock a man unconscious, Sam’s flared nostrils when he turns back from scouting ahead and is enraged by whatever he sees.

Then he ducks into another room.

Callen takes his first real, sharp breath since they parachuted from the stealth plane twenty minutes ago. Running to Torales’ seaside fortress happened underwater. All the sensations bleed together now, syrupy paint with too much linseed oil added, in a way that forces pigments to mix and mingle and seethe and—

“G? Do you copy?”

Callen nods without missing a beat. “Copy, Sam.”

In lifting up his rifle scope, he sees the green and white night vision forms of his team. There’s a fourth person in the melee besides himself and the unconscious or dead guards.

“We’ve got her,” Kensi confirms, also in a whisper so soft it sounds like static.

‘We’ means she and Sam, while Callen watches the hallway and Deeks stands at their rear guard with such a feral and protective expression Callen almost doesn’t recognize him. The night is peaceful, aside from the crash of ocean waves outside, buffeting the eastern walls of the compound. Wind aids their entry into Torales’ stronghold and masks the sound of their footfalls.

This is an off night for Torales, one of the rare moments when he must feel smug and comfortable over being in possession of the upper hand if he’s willing to drop his alertness. It is…it strange to Callen, however, the more he thinks about it, that Rhea should be kept on the main floor of the stone fortress, barely four hallways in. This isn’t wise security protocol even for someone new at this, a category Tuong Torales certainly doesn’t fall under. Not with all the people he’s massacred so far alone.

Rhea is—mercifully, in some ways—unconscious when Sam carries her out in a bridal hold, though whether from shock, injury, or hunger remains unclear. It’s too dark to see her in any detail and Callen’s night vision scope is of no help in scanning for anything wrong. Even gushing blood wounds tend to blend with the rest of the green and heat signature white in most cases. Kensi follows at Sam’s rear, rifle raised to protect from behind.

When Sam gets within arm’s reach, Callen reaches out and touches his shoulder. His fingers knead past Kevlar into Sam’s shirt underneath.

Sam nods in response to the unspoken query. “She’s alive, G.”

“Time to head to the extraction point,” Callen whispers to Deeks through the comm. link, who is farthest away by the southern entrance to the hallway and therefore probably can’t see much more of what’s going on than shadows. “Exfil will only be here for another hour.”

“Copy.” Deeks adds another micro memory to the pile of them clamoring around in Callen’s head—just a gentle flick of eyelashes that snare meager light from arrowslit windows high overhead in miasmic bronze shards. “No activity from outside or the entrance.”

“We’re clear,” Kensi confirms, where she faces the belly of the beast, in the opposite direction.

And then the air goes suddenly quiet.

This is not to say that it hasn’t been hushed from the moment the quartet set foot on hostile territory, of course, with it being one in the morning. The guard rotation is in lax posture around the side gate, there’s a lack of barking, lamps off in upper apartment floors, ocean waves lapping at the walls of what was once a historic castle with gentle rhythms. The compound is accompanied by all the signature soundtrack markings of a quiet evening.

But even wind has died now, making Sam’s boots across the dusty floor the loudest sound.

The paint smears into an ugly, mud-ridden soup of not-colours that leech at Callen’s thoughts. He halts, trying to make sense of this canvas set out in the rain. There is only time for one more snap of his mind’s camera:

Sam’s eyes whip around to rest on Callen’s face, wide enough that the whites are showing. 

Callen’s stomach _wrenches._

“Kensi, we have to—”

And then real orange filigree gets added to this ruined painting, so dazzling that all four are instantly blinded. Voices erupt in a hidden rafter by the windows.

Callen never hears the first shot, not when it cracks like superheated flint through his arm and lights up the world in a bright flash—but there’s no missing the second.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “ _Sam_.”
> 
> The big man stops, swaying in place.
> 
> Callen snakes a hand around his shaky wrist. “Look at me. _Please_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I realize there are some jumping-around-in-time themes happening that might be confusing, so:
> 
> Callen and Sam on the dinghy = present day  
> Anything with Torales and/or the fortress = past  
> Italics/book quotes = to be revealed...can't give everything away! 
> 
> Thanks for reading along! Despite this mess of gourmet angst, it does get better by the end.

‘The fighting is done and nobody’s won  
So now we’re just laying here with steaming empty guns,  
And half of my heart has always been yours  
So now I’m just laying here in pieces on the floor.’

“Half-Hearted” ~ We Three

Their yellow dinghy doesn’t look so, well…yellow anymore.

Night falls by such agonizing pie slices that Callen almost flips the sun the bird. Almost, because he’s out of fight and anger and insisting that things go off without a hitch just because he’s had enough of FUBAR missions to last two lifetimes.

“Think we’re near land?”

“No, G.” A sigh. “By my calculations, we’re somewhere in the dead zone of the North Pacific.”

“M’kay,” says Callen, like that’s a normal sort of update to get from your partner.

It hits Callen right as that thought coalesces, with the same shattering fascination as putting murder suspect clues together—this never felt like a mission at all.

He’s not quite sure why, but from the moment Hetty called them into the bullpen at that strange hour, none of them clocked in. Not mentally, not emotionally, not even professionally. Callen sat beside Sam on that stealth plane, across from Kensi and Deeks in the aisle, all of them too somber and keyed up to sleep…and it felt like a post mission decompression time. With the same sloppy vulnerability they experienced in Deeks’ bar after closing hours, a little buzzed and voluble, admitting things they never would outside of this team, not even to their families.

_Maybe my humanity really will be the death of me. Wouldn’t that just be the way._

Callen doesn’t mind the thought so much, and he wouldn’t change one second of how he lived with this team. Not in exchange for the love he’s known in return. It’s all he’s ever wanted and they handed it to him without provisos or conditions.

 _We love you_ , every action of every day said, _just because you are you. You do not have to earn it._

Reality kicks him squarely in the teeth once more when the dinghy goes over a sharp bump and pain spikes along his back.

“Sam,” he says. “Sam, come here.”

Sam, of course, doesn’t hear him or chooses to ignore him, in keeping with the pattern of the last three times Callen’s said this.

His partner hustles around on one knee, the other stretched out before him and black with infection where another shard of bone threatens to peek out from the makeshift bandage again. Disjointed fingers play with a sewing needle and a Styrofoam cup of water.

Callen reaches out a drunken hand. “We don’t have a magnet, Sam.”

“Clasp,” is all Sam says, pointing to the ration box.

Callen squints at the box’s white front. It does indeed have magnetized clasps on either side.

Sam runs the needle over the magnet again and sets it in the water, on top of a piece of plastic acting as the leaf. “It won’t seem to settle on North.”

Stars begin to wink above them, more than Callen has ever seen in his life. He never knew the sky _could_ hold so much colour, especially this far from light pollution. Flickers of white, sapphire, pink, and yellow play across the sky, as if someone set a prism to the cosmos to let the first of all light shine through in polychromatic fragments.

Callen treasures that he gets to own this one thing, if it’s the last thing he does.

“I suppose we could just follow the constellations.” Sam misinterprets Callen’s awe of the overhead view. “But they’re no good for navigation when the sun comes up.”

Callen wishes he could see the stars up close, wishes for a lot of things. Even if a neon pathway was lit up for them back to Taiwan or some speck of an island, it wouldn’t matter. Callen feels like he’s failing at his job, saying what needs to be said so his team doesn’t have to.

“Sam…” His lips tremble for a moment and it surprises him, such an out of the blue physical expression of emotion that he freezes. “We can’t…you’ve gotta stop.”

Sam bristles next to him, sloshing the cup. It smears the blood-soaked bottom of the dinghy even further. Callen would appreciate the irony of being marinated in his own sauce if he couldn’t feel, with visceral clarity, every single laboured pump of his heart exit his body.

Each breath is audible now.

“Why are you talking like this, G? Come on, we’ve gotten out of worse.” Sam sounds almost betrayed, and Callen feels a low sting of guilt.

“Please, Sam.” He can’t speak above a whisper now, not with the slushie slurp of his lungs. “Please come here.”

They’re pressed together, no personal space to speak of on the cramped float, but Callen trusts Sam to know what he means. He’s not asking for physical proximity.

“I refuse to give up, G.”

“I know you’re not,” Callen soothes. “Because there’s nothing _to_ give up.”

“Kensi and Deeks will—”

Callen grits his teeth. “I know you know that Kensi and Deeks are—”

“Don’t say it. Don’t you even say it.” Sam’s eyes burn, more out of frustration than anger. He checks yet again through the supply kit and comes up empty in the hunt for a flare.

“Maybe I can make one,” the former SEAL says. _Again_.

This time when Callen’s lips tremble, he doesn’t bother stilling them. Who else is going to see? Who else would care or judge him here, at the edge of the world?

Blood bubbles over his bottom teeth. “Sam, look at me.”

Sam talks over him. “Assuming I can start a signal fire without destroying the dinghy, these granola bars should keep it going long enough for another boat to see.”

“Sam?”

“If only we hadn’t lost the oars. They were wood and fibreglass, perfect for a small fire.”

“S…” Callen has to swallow and it tastes like metallic treacle. “Sam.”

Sam roots through their rations pack for matches, though there have been none the last four times he inventoried. “You’re lucky BUD/S covered this exact scenario—I’ll get a signal fire started in no time. Besides, we’re highlighter yellow, right? No air rescue is going to miss that.”

“Come on, Sam—”

“I have to keep—”

“ _Sam_.”

The big man stops, swaying in place.

Callen snakes a hand around his shaky wrist. “Look at me. _Please._ ”

Sam doesn’t, but he ceases his frantic motion.

“We can’t just…” A full body shiver wracks through him, so violent that it almost dislodges Callen’s grip. “G, I refuse to accept there’s no getting out of this. It’s not who I am.”

“Sam.” They are each other’s back up, have been for almost fifteen years now. Callen’s not going to fail Sam when he’s needed most. So he says what needs to be said, the lost words haunting their thoughts. “Our lives ended the minute we hit open ocean. Kensi, Deeks, Rhea—they’re all dead. It’s over.”

“Not for me, it’s not. Not until there are no other options left.”

Callen’s breath hitches, because they reached that point hours ago. “It’s _over_ , Sam.”

Sam punches the side of the dinghy, startling Callen. He jolts, wincing.

“I’m sorry!” It’s impossible to really see each other amidst the pitch black out in the middle of nowhere, but Sam must hear his squelching gasp of breath. “I’m sorry, G. Hey, hey, just settle for a second, alright?”

He shifts around so that he’s propped on one elbow next to Callen. There’s a wet _snick_ sound once his leg moves that almost makes Callen throw up, the dreaded crunch of Sam’s bone rubbing against itself.

Sam goes still for a long minute and Callen wonders if he’s finally passed out. Because Callen still has a loose hold of his partner’s wrist, he can feel the second Sam’s heart misses a beat or three and starts back up at a woozy rhythm.

They rarely fight for real, and certainly not when one or both of them are this far gone. It rattles Callen more than the numb sensation in his limbs.

Part of him appreciates the paradox, that he was once shot over half a dozen times and survived, but this time…this time two bullets, broken ribs, and subdermal hemorrhages are enough to kill him. This time he’s drowning from the inside out. He wonders which will do him in first.

There’s another trapeze moment, Sam’s face heavy and sad. Callen looks up at him.

They’ve just had their bedtime ration of water but neither bothers to sleep. It’s their third act, and somehow both Callen and Sam know that if they close their eyes, let their threaded pulses drop below a certain resting rate—there’s no waking up.

Then Sam pitches forward, pressing his battered forehead to Callen’s. It’s warm—too warm, feverish, sweltering—and blissful against his chilled skin, because this is Sam and Sam means _home_ , even in the farthest reaches of the ocean.

Callen breathes out, shaking, trying to recapture lost oxygen and express everything. All the stolen moments of fear and love and knowing that he belonged somewhere now, to these people, through the vein-to-vein contact and hold on Sam’s arm.

He shakes so broadly and for so long that it sloughs off his tough, agent persona like a wet dog. His sense of self sufficiency. His strategic mind. His hope.

Sam leans back after a moment of just being close, in each other’s air. “I’m not giving up, G.”

“I know you won’t.”

Sam doesn’t reply other than to carefully pat Callen’s sternum, mindful of the long streaks of flayed skin running down his torso. Counterintuitive as it is, Callen is reassured by the broad heft of his hand, the burden of how different they are and the fact that at least, at the very least, he does not have to die alone.

He gazes up at stars, at this promise of silent witnesses to the world’s petty toil. Torales seems so small all of a sudden. They all do. What are terrorists to stars, around for thousands of years and burning brighter than a human life?

 _Perhaps we are their stars_ , he thinks, recognizing his own delirium. He is not wrought with infection like Sam, but blood loss slowly siphons his ability to concentrate. _They watch us rage and fall and be wished upon._

Off the dinghy’s port side, there’s a funny puff of air and then spray rains down in a fine mist. That’s odd. The sky is perfectly clear at the moment, not a cloud in sight.

Sam stiffens. Gingerly, taking it by increments so as not to jar Callen, he sits up and lets out a soft cry.

“What?” Callen doesn’t take his eyes off the bright Sirius star, partly because moving his spine is a nightmare. Salty droplets wet their faces. “What is it? Don’t tell me we’re about to be eaten by a shark.”

In answer, a dark form glides over the Big Dipper with the outline of a long, half sweetheart shape. It’s barely two arm lengths from their dinghy, a flipper the breadth of several football field goals brushing the bottom of it. Though Callen winces again while it coasts along his back, he can’t stop his slack jawed wonder. It’s fortunate enough that they weren’t capsized or rolled over upon, let alone that they got to see it at all.

Then their night time visitor passes soundlessly back into the water, the breath from SUV-sized lungs spraying them again.

“No way,” Callen breathes. He listens to the blue whale sing on its way back down. He almost says, _Eric’s not gonna believe this when I tell him. He’ll flip out and pepper us with marine biology facts and_ …before he catches himself.

The sight of the whale fluke seems to distress Sam even more, somehow. He begins to tremor as well, his violent and small compared to Callen’s. “If I wasn’t sure before—now I know we’re _really_ far from land.”

Callen says nothing, not because he’s lost his breath or to save oxygen, but because he is tired of verbalizing things no one else will. He wishes Deeks was here, to say what they’re thinking and maybe use a joke to wipe the mournful looks off their faces in the process.

“Do you think they suffered?” Callen asks.

Sam is utterly motionless for a beat. It’s a suspension, just like the sun earlier that night, a hover of time.

Then he slides an arm under Callen’s head, so that his neck is nestled in the crook of Sam’s elbow. The lie falls from his mouth with tender words. “Of course not. Kensi probably fought to the end but they finished it quick, no question.”

Callen is consoled, despite knowing better. “I miss them.”

“Me too.” They’re rocking now, though Callen can’t tell if it’s Sam’s body or the waves. “Me too, G.”

 _Pat…pat…_ Callen hears his own blood, what’s coming out of his nose and off the chest of what was once his stealth shirt, drip onto the rubber. He doesn’t much notice or care, still hardly blinking while he stares up at the sky and listens to the low, barely-there whistle of blue whales miles below them.

Nothing makes sense and everything does, the passing of time and its effect upon them fracturing like a kaleidoscope in radiant Fibonacci fractals. One of the stars must be a planet, with the unusually bright, amber way it winks at Callen, and for some reason it makes his breath hitch again.

“G?” Sam hears the sound, instantly on alert. He places a hot hand against Callen’s cheek. “G, stay with me.”

Callen wonders if Torales ever takes time to look out his window at this same view, to appreciate that no matter how poor a person is, every human owns the night sky. He wonders about what Hetty will think when they don’t return. He wonders how she’ll explain the failed rescue to Ambassador Carson, the funeral he’ll have to plan for a daughter even without her body.

He wonders if Kensi and Deeks held hands when they died.

Suddenly he cannot see the stars at all, blurring together in wefts of discoloured string.

“Come on, don’t clock out on me now.”

And Callen knows this is his cue to say something witty or comforting, to reassure Sam that he’s not leaving him behind and never will, the very reason they’re here in the first place.

But Callen feels the bread crumbs slip from his eyes, a river down crimson stained cheeks.

“Ssshhh,” Sam hushes him. He wheezes through his own agony. “I’ve got you, G, I’m here.”

“There was…” Callen’s eyes, at last, clench shut. His throat aches. “There was a flower.”

* * *

_Thirty hours earlier:_

Torales’ personal quarters don’t look anything like your Hollywood version of a terrorist’s base camp abode. There are no guns in crates with straw (why is it always straw?) or blood stains or the ghostly screams of past victims echoing from the corners.

In fact, when Callen is forced to kneel before the plush red armoire, he does so on an equally plush rug.

The armoire is very throne-like, however. Something that _does_ fit with the dictator flavour Torales emotes with his proud stance and calm, calculating eyes where they rest on the blood dripping down Callen’s shirt.

He woke alone in a cement cell, only to hear Sam and Kensi’s voices already raging from somewhere down the hall. She swore a blue streak that made even Callen impressed and Sam babbled on and on in Mandarin…

He hadn’t heard Deeks, but that didn’t mean anything. Perhaps, Callen reasons, they are a distraction while Deeks works his squirrely magic to get them free. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Their yells followed Callen’s trek all the way into this room and he would be lying if the thought of them in pain while he hunches here in front of a dictator doesn’t weaken his resolve not to reveal anything.

Blood loss toys with his sense of logic, apparently—Callen doesn’t get the memo about Kensi and Sam’s ire until Sam himself is also escorted into the room. And now he’s swearing enough to rival Kensi. Two burly men hold him by the arms, a third with a rifle at Sam’s back. It’s a good thing too, since Sam’s shoulders sag upon catching sight of Callen.

“Oh man.” Sam switches to English. “I thought they’d killed you, G. We were demanding to see your body.”

Callen blinks while they force Sam to his knees beside him. He looks unharmed, relatively speaking. Other than some bruises around Sam’s face and neck, probably from the hallway ambush, he seems fine.

“I’m okay,” Callen says under his breath.

Sam turns vicious eyes onto Torales, without one hint of fear or tactical reasoning. Callen is so shocked by this that for a minute he can’t do anything but stare.

“His back is bleeding,” Sam snaps. It’s waspish, a heated razor of molten fury. “He needs better bandages than the weak job your boys did.”

Callen glances again at the ACE bandage they secured around his right arm, where a through and through bullet perforated. There must be a matching one on his back, accounting for the bulk he feels. He’d taken the shoddy medical care as a comfort, that Torales needs him coherent and… _not_ dead for whatever is coming next.

But his back…

Callen felt the shot to his spine in the way a glass pane feels the bite of a sandstorm, melting away the coating of his flesh, hitting the girder of his vertebrae. When he woke, he lifted his shirt to see no exit wound.

Not that he needed to. Every time he breathes, the hot pebble of the bullet lodged somewhere in his latissimus muscles tickles bone.

“Ah yes.” Torales is unfazed by the harsh way Sam’s words ring around the room. He leans forward, elbows on his knees so he’s at eye level with Sam. It’s the first time he’s spoken, and his English is not as accented as expected. “Your friend here isn’t dead, a small miracle really.”

Then he turns the monitor lizard stare onto Callen, who hates this much more than being ignored. “That bullet is the only reason you’re still alive.”

Callen says it before Torales can, because that’s his job and he wants to be on an even playing field for the upcoming unpleasantness. “It’s slowed the bleeding. Plugging the hole.”

“Very good. You have advanced first aid training.” Torales maintains eye contact, a fact Callen _does_ appreciate. “Yes, that second shot to you was an accident. I ordered my men to take you alive, otherwise this whole operation is a waste.”

A fish of dread belly-ups in Callen’s stomach. “Operation…you knew we were coming.”

Torales sizes him up like a prized catch. “Funny how our hearts get us into traps, isn’t it?”

Callen looks at Sam, only to see him still glaring at Torales. With his hands tied behind his back like Callen, they twitch in mortise shapes, as if he’d rather be strangling someone. His anger surprises Callen afresh and he nudges Sam subtly with his elbow.

“They dragged your body past our cell,” says Sam under his breath. “Taunting us. They took photographs too.”

Sam’s choice of word—body, not just _you_ —is as much of a dead giveaway as Sam’s bloodshot rage. It’s single minded, the surprising part, but his emotion is not.

Callen doesn’t know what to say to reassure him: _my back is agony, but at least I’m conscious now and got dragged the whole way here because my legs don’t feel right_? That’s guaranteed to end in a blood bath more than it already probably will.

Callen assessed the room, since Sam seems incapable right now, but they’re outnumber over three to one. While they’ve faced worse odds—they’ve never done so this injured.

“…A lot of people in my position go in guns blazing,” says Torales, and Callen tunes back in only to realize the man has been soliloquy-rambling during their quick moment. “But a little research goes a long way and the world is none the wiser.”

“Research?” Callen can’t help but ask, to keep him talking. Sam nudges sharply in return. Callen ignores him.

Torales smiles and it’s an instant douse of arctic water.

“I found out Jerome Carson used to work for the Vietnamese liberation force as well. A simple search, really, once I knew who to ask.”

Vietnamese liberation force…Callen pauses over a laboured, shallow inhale to avoid pushing on the bullet where it throbs. Why does that sound familiar? His thoughts are a little soupy, his mind’s camera blurring images together, and he can’t hang on to the association.

Torales’ next words are almost gentle. They sound so damask soft, in fact, that hairs flip up on the back of Callen’s neck. “I knew she’d come, for his and his daughter’s sake. That you’d all come.”

Callen still doesn’t understand, but Sam must. His body locks up, from his ears to his toes. Like Kensi, he bares his upper teeth for a moment. Callen wonders why his normally button-down partner isn’t playing it close to the vest like they always do in these situations. He’s better trained and this type of behaviour is rarely in the playbook.

The display of aggression only serves to widen Torales’ smile. “Your friend is smarter than you.”

It takes Callen a solid minute to understand that this rebuke is aimed at him and not Sam.

Torales turns his black eyes onto Callen. “He knows what I’m about to ask next.”

It happens so fast that Callen doesn’t even have time to see it—Torales slides an ivory handled pistol from under his shirt and whips it across Callen's face. Blood gushes out of his nose in dam-breaking squirts, warm and goopy. When the ringing in his ears fades, Callen spits out the blood between his teeth only to hear Sam raging. He sounds like an enraged bull, chest heaving.

After wiping it clean, Torales aims the gun at Callen’s forehead. Not even two inches away.

“Tell me where I can find Henrietta Lange or he dies. And don’t bother lying, as I’m already well aware that you are federal agents.”

Not pulling any punches, then. Callen just blinks at the barrel, his eyes blank. This was never about Carson.

“Hey!” Sam snaps again. “Point it at me. I’m team leader. He doesn’t know anything.”

“That’s why I am threatening him and not you.” The words are factual, like a university lecture. Torales doesn’t rise to the bait, though his eyes gleam with menace at Sam.

Callen’s voice comes out equally blank, buffeted on the edges by a tight authority. “He’s lying to protect me—I’m team lead on this mission and I report directly to Director Lange.”

Torales cocks the gun, though he doesn’t move it away from Callen. “A good choice, agent. You’re going to make a phone call, asking her to come here.”

Callen scowls at him, insides churning.

This, of all things, seems to surprise Torales. His head tilts to one side, lips parted and slack. “Are you really willing to risk your team on bravado?”

“We won’t give anything, you bastard!” Sam tries to rise up on his knees. A guard pushes on his shoulder.

Torales is not just a megalomaniac like the Western papers portray him—he’s a good judge of character too. He sits back at Sam’s declaration, his eyes a lie detector needle.

“I believe you.” With a flick of his hand and a nod, yet more guards descend to lift Callen under his arms. “But perhaps we can find a way to…loosen your tongue.”

That beautiful, engraved gun barrel swings like a batter hitting a home run—straight into Callen’s temple.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Torales simply takes out his own pistol, aiming it at Deeks.
> 
> _WHA-BANG!_
> 
> All three agents freeze.

‘I’ve got no time for haunting  
The ones I’ve held so dear,  
So I’ll carve the crudest message now  
Before I disappear.’

“Laying Down to Perish” ~ Alan Doyle

_‘We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life.’_

_The words are a flittering compass needle that cannot find direction, spasmodic in its haste to one side, then the other, shivering all the while. But Callen knows them like he knows air. Like he knows Sam._

_When did the two of them start thinking they were invincible, that they could do this job forever? When did he stop wanting what was offered so freely? Why didn’t he just let what they have be enough?_

_Getting old, losing its hold, forcing himself into a white picket mold, digging for gratuitous gold—_

_Sweet dreams…ah, sweet dreams…_

_And G Callen is alone._

* * *

Callen finds out why Deeks wasn’t making any noise earlier.

He immediately wishes he hadn’t.

He’s aware of exactly two things upon first waking, one being the ache in his hip, from too much time spent on a frigid surface, and the other—

“I think he’s coming around for good this time.”

“You’re no better off.”

“Thanks, Dr. Blye.”

“I’m just saying, Sam, you need to sit down. Now. That broken rib might have punctured something, not to mention your matching set concussions.”

Callen manages to wrestle his eyes open, puzzled by black denim under his cheek. Strange fingers trace along his scalp in soothing patterns. Strange not because the touch is unfamiliar, but because they’re not the right shape to match the other sensory clues—peach soap, skinny legs, gunpowder residue.

Dark hair tumbling over his cheek when a face bends into his line of sight.

“K’si?”

“There he is.” Kensi grins, alight with relief. It exposes dried blood framing each tooth like pictures at a gallery. “You’ve been incoherent the last few times.”

With the dim interior of their eight-by-eight cement cell, the same he was in before, Callen almost thinks it’s night time, that he missed an entire day. But then he hears the splash of rain outside, an afternoon tropical storm. A wicked one too—Sam’s pate is wet from free climbing hand holds in the wall to reach the window twelve feet above. It’s only the width of his arm, but that doesn’t stop Sam from weaseling out any possible tactical advantages.

They were all put together this round. Callen didn’t expect that.

“H’w long?” he rasps.

Kensi’s brow divots, though her warm ministrations across his skin don’t stop where she has his head cradled on her stretched-out knees. She consults with Sam using a look. “Just a few hours, meaning we’ve been captured for almost a whole day. We turned you onto your side when the bleeding…got worse.”

Only now does Callen feel Kensi’s other hand pressed just below his shoulder blades, holding his liquid where it’s supposed to be. Distantly, he thinks it should hurt more.

Callen inhales a careful breath and winces. It works, though, in that pain zips the world into better focus. “Did blood loss make me pass out? Or was it the gun butt?”

Another quick look between Sam and Kensi.

Callen squints at his partner. “Sam?”

Sam jumps down from the window and kneels beside Callen. It looks like it takes effort, and there are new bruises on his face and chest that weren’t there when Callen apparently lost time. A stem and floret design is reverse-frieze imprinted in patterned cuts along Sam’s temple, the irritated skin pulvinated by Torales’ engraved gun. Callen imagines he’s got a matching one where his forehead prickles.

“You don’t remember?” Sam asks, quiet.

Callen gives a weak shake of his chin.

Kensi deflates in relief, pressing cool lips to Callen’s cheek. “Oh, thank God.”

A second time, Callen notices that Kensi’s hand on his scalp doesn’t feel quite right. It’s…too big, like it belongs to Deeks rather than her slender, deadly fingers. It catches in places too, not quite so smooth or dexterous. As if she’s wearing a tight glove or umpire mitt. The feather light touch lifts instead of dragging across his scalp. 

Callen reaches up, barely brushing the skin of her hand—

Kensi snatches it back with a hiss that Callen can hear as well as feel in the diaphragm pressed to his crown. He gasps. “Kens—”

“It’s fine,” she gets out, clipped.

But it’s not.

After clutching the hand against her chest for a minute, Kensi lowers it slowly back down to Callen’s line of sight. Though she begins to rub the back of his wrist, he keeps it perfectly still to avoid any abrupt motion that might cause the inflamed limb pain:

The fingers are swollen to twice their normal size, segmented in an unnatural way. Magenta, amoeba-shaped blotches puff under the skin, every single knuckle broken or shattered by Torales’ boot. It’s one giant bruise, mangled to the point that even Callen, no doctor, can tell she may never use the hand properly again. She breathes evenly, but a rhythmic catch mars her exhales.

“They came while I was out,” Callen guesses.

“We had our turn at Torture by Torales.” Kensi tries to make it a joke, like Deeks would, but it falls flat. And Callen is assaulted by a stupid kind of guilt, that he wasn’t awake to protect them. Then it hits Callen—Torales is doing this just to spite him. “That’s _why_ you’re out.”

Sam’s eyes darken where he still crouches by Callen’s stomach. He adjusts his partner’s arm bandage and eyes Kensi’s hand, his own shaking with arcane, icy rage.

He nods to answer the silent question. “Torales shoved the bullet in _deeper_ , G. That bastard…”

Sam runs a hand down his face, top to bottom, and his breaths come fast now. “You were still out when they came to ask us again about Hetty. I refused and he just laughed and _laughed._ Taunting us with the upper hand. Then he took a pen and…”

Again, Sam can’t finish.

Callen tests his lungs and sure enough, the bullet feels different, like a blazing white needle instead of the dead lump of ember coal. He doesn’t know whether to be grateful or cross that he didn’t wake up for this personal beat down.

“We couldn’t stop him,” Kensi whispers.

“Oh,” is all Callen says to this new revelation, oddly numb to his own suffering. “We were set up, huh? Are you guys okay?”

Though it’s a dumb, obvious question, he’s not talking about their physical injuries. He’s asking about the haunted glaze in Kensi’s eyes and Sam’s agitated motions, void of his usual zen, and the odd silence where a fourth voice should be.

“They didn’t shoot us in the hallway,” Kensi assures him. A deliberate gloss over the real question. “Once we saw you go down, we surrendered.”

Callen’s lips harden. “You shouldn’t have.”

“Oh yes _we should have_.” Kensi’s tone is so cast iron, irascible, that Callen doesn’t even open his mouth.

Sam is already back up on his feet and doesn’t contribute to Kensi’s authoritative declaration, save a nod. “I’m looking for an escape route, G. Don’t worry. They need us alive and if we hold out, we’ll survive until exfil comes to rescue us. Assuming we aren’t already out by then.”

Callen’s gut tugs again, but he looks up at Kensi this time. It’s an automatic move, seamless because he knows it like a heartbeat.

Kensi meets his eyes in a completion of the usual ritual. And finally Callen notices the most important thing, what he should have from the moment of waking:

Deeks, sprawled on the floor under the window—Sam’s been standing guard over him this whole time, always between Deeks and the door.

He’s on his side too, face a mess and one eye so bloated by cobalt bruising that without the shaggy hair, Callen might have to do a double take before identifying him. Blood leaks out of his left nostril. They’ve carefully positioned him so he’s within arm’s reach for all three of them, even Callen in his ungainly slump across Kensi’s lap.

She murmurs around a harsh swallow. “He won’t wake up.”

“Head wound?”

“He fought when…when Torales crushed my hand, and things got…”

“Ugly,” Callen finishes, soft, stroking her wrist well away from the wound.

Kensi nods. “I think the sinusoidal bone jammed into his nasal airways. He’s breathing, but it’s not good.”

 _Not good_ is a horrid underestimation, from what Callen can see. Marty’s chest barely moves and yet there’s a whistle in his throat; not the high pitched, cartoonish kind, but low and bi-tonal, as if air is passing through a narrow pipe.

Callen’s eyes dart again to Kensi. She doesn’t glance at her husband, but in the quick span of Callen looking away and back, her eyes have filled with tears. Unshed, controlled, but oh so conclusive. Callen reads it all in her eyes, one fell blow.

His heart goes blank too.

“We’re just having a rough night out on the town.”

Kensi laughs. “Oh yeah? Just shooting the breeze?”

“That’s right.” Callen smiles too. Glad he could lift her spirits even for this one microcosm of a moment. “Piece of cake—this feels exactly like that time we all got drunk after Owen died and fell asleep in a pile under Hetty’s desk.”

“You and I have very different memories of that.”

Callen plays along, scoffing. “That’s because I don’t _have_ any memories after we finished the bottle of scotch at all.”

“I miss him,” she says quietly, and she’s not talking about Granger.

Callen reaches up for Kensi’s face, just a pass of dirty fingertips on her cheek. Kensi leans into it anyway. Her hair strokes across his scraped knuckles, falling free from its braid and crusty with her own blood. The fact she hasn’t fixed it feels odd, like a knickknack sitting out of its own dust ring—but Callen know what it means. He inanely wishes he could reach up and fix her hair, loop it back in those complicated hair twists he’s never quite understood how she pulls off.

“Sam won’t admit it, in denial,” Kensi whispers. “There’s no way to escape. We’ve searched this room corner to corner. And Torales doesn’t care who he has to kill to get Hetty’s attention. We’re the bait, Callen, and he can’t possibly need all four of us for that to work.”

“There’s no way to barter, stall for time?”

“I don’t think so…” Kensi shakes her hair, inadvertently fanning Callen’s cheek. “We tried that and, well, you’re the evidence of how poorly it went. I even tried picking the locks, then the door hinges…we’re caged, G.”

Callen’s mouth sets in a grim smile, because he and Kensi have always been the realists, compared to the polemic optimism of Sam and Marty. Sam doesn’t hear her admission, a small mercy, and so Callen is free to soak up this sight of his family, of someone who’s snatched him from the fire more times than he can recount.

A sister in all but blood.

“Tell Sam I love him.” Kensi sniffs, not that it does much good. “He wouldn’t listen to me earlier.”

An assertive heat rushes through Callen’s body, from the hairs on his head to his ankle bones, his body comprehending with a mixture of pride and devastation what this means before his conscious mind can.

Pride, because he’s come so far that he, of all people, doesn’t recognize these words at first. Devastation, because he knows Kensi has every good reason to say them.

There are few people better at goodbyes than G Callen used to be. Childhood G Callen got passed around to such an absurd number of foster homes and schools that he felt like the birthday boy, blindfolded, spun around, hitting the pinata. He still has that metaphorical baseball bat in his heart’s hand—it’s just used to defend rather than lash out now.

So now he’s clumsy at them, at these farewells without name. Once you start naming _yourself_ , he’s learned, naming the absence of good things becomes insurmountable.

He is _Grisha_ , born to a family he barely remembers.

He is _son_.

He is _uncle_ , a title held close while watching these young lives grow up into the competent people Sam’s kids are today.

He is _brother_.

He is _friend_ , but this one falls flat suddenly. Friend is such a small word, only six letters, not able to hold the acres of love he’s harvested over a decade with this team. You can’t spell friend without _end_ , and this is something so blasphemous that he has, foolishly, stopped thinking about it.

He is _condemned_ and _dying_ and _forgiven_ , but only one of these really matters, no matter how urgent the other two might seem.

Looking at Sam, there is a single word for his identity left, one he was christened with long ago: G Callen is _chosen._

Kensi Blye is the wisest of them all—she sees how this is going to end, even before they do.

“I love you, Kens.”

Kensi grins again, impossibly. “Love you too.”

“You’re really the best of us, you know that?”

“If only Marty was awake to hear that.” Kensi loses the battle with two tears. Just two. They’re small, tiny beads that catch chain lightning buffeting the outside walls, but they hit Callen’s temple and he thinks whoever invented that phrase— _blood is thicker than water_ —has never met their team. These tears are like tar, thicker than the blood tangled in Kensi’s dimples. “I’d never let him live it down.”

Callen catches the second tear on his thumb before his arm drops, too tired to stay upright. Kensi kisses him again, on the stubbly part of his cheek near his ear. He senses that this time it’s more for her comfort than his. Her lips are hotter now, and she smells like sweat, but it might as well be a lullaby for how grounded it makes Callen feel.

“Kens?” he asks, to get her attention. “Can you…? I wanna be near him for a bit.”

“Okay.” Kensi doesn’t argue, which is the biggest neon sign anyone could flash at Callen that they’re dangerously close to game over. There’s no fussing over wounds or telling him to take it easy—Kensi gently lifts Callen by his shoulders and drags him over to Deeks.

Corpse like and oh so still, Marty doesn’t move when Callen curls up beside him, close enough that his breath ruffles Deeks’ hair.

“Grisha?”

Callen starts at the sound of his own name from Kensi’s cracked lips. She’s never said it before. “Yeah?”

“If they…” Kensi has to stop, her hand tight on Callen’s shoulder. And even though he can’t see her face now, he knows what it would look like, based on that distinct tone he’s only heard a handful of times. “If they take us separately, that is, if it’s my…turn…first and Deeks wakes up while I’m gone, you let him know…”

Callen contorts behind him for her good hand, soaked in his blood as it is. “He already knows, sestra.”

She holds on for a long moment, then squeezes their hands in a nauseating squelch and lets go.

After that, there is no more talking, from any of them. Sam continues his endless sweep of the room while trying to make a weapon out of the metal in his dog tags and Kensi sets up a self appointed watch by the door. 

Callen focuses everything on Deeks, just because he wants to. Marty is never still, never silent. To see him like this is a compass pointing south, everything contrary to what it’s supposed to be.

“I’m sorry,” Callen breathes. It’s addressed to all three of his teammates.

Callen palms at Deeks’ face too. It’s affectionate and reverent and on any other day Callen would feel embarrassed. But today is not any other day and Marty is too still. He is never _not_ tapping his toes or clicking his fingers or strutting verbal plumage that makes them feel human.

Deeks doesn’t stir at the caress. Callen is careful to avoid his swollen eye, faintly scruffing the matted hair and marvelling at the gold caught in his fingernails. In pushing it back, he sees a nasty gash along Deeks’ temple too, as if someone clocked him with a steel toed boot.

Callen extracts his hand from the Rumpelstiltskin cloud with tender caution and counts each breath in the detective’s lungs. 

“I’m so sorry.” Callen latches onto Marty’s limp hand even as voices march ever closer to their cell. “I’m so sorry, I’m sorry…”

* * *

Callen’s eyes have crusted shut at some point in the night, from the salt water sprayed onto him by their mammoth visitor. Sam wipes it free. Not that Callen slept, but keeping them open is becoming a concerted effort. He blinks a few times at pink flutters on the horizon that have replaced the stars.

Sunrise.

_Red skies by morning…_

“Sam?”

“Yeah?”

“I didn’t mean for it to go like this.”

Sam snorts. “Once a fool, always a fool—G, _I’m_ the one who forced your hand.”

Callen shakes his head. “This mission was pear shaped from the start because we were set up from the start. I should have followed my gut instinct that something wasn’t right.”

“If this is supposed to be a pick-me-up speech, it’s not working.”

“Sam…” Callen tries to grab Sam’s hand but he pulls away, mouth tight. “Sam, I need you to…I don’t want to go alone.”

“You won’t.” Sam’s eyes brighten. “Because I’m right here. We’re going to be rescued off this yellow death trap and make it home together, alright?”

They aren’t, but Callen doesn’t have the energy to argue anymore.

* * *

It turns out adrenaline can achieve wild things when the moment is right.

Callen wakes to the unmistakable sound of keys. His whole body aches, even in sleep, so it doesn’t bother him to be woken out of the fitful doze.

Sam makes a disgusted sound. “Here we go again. Third try’s the charm, right?”

Kensi doesn’t answer, already awake. She glances at her husband, kept safe by Sam’s presence beside him. Callen catches her eye and she nods.

_Torales and his men again._

The warlord marches in and his eyes do a circuit around the quartet of agents. He points at Kensi. “Her.”

One of his goons raises a rifle straight to Kensi’s temple, faster than Callen can draw breath to protest.

Thunder crashes outside the window while Callen and Torales lock eyes, each refusing to blink and give the other the satisfaction.

“Tell me how to contact Henrietta Lange or I will shoot your friend.” Torales doesn’t blink and Callen hates him a little more for it, for torturing his team with zero remorse. Sam reaches for Callen and tugs him to his feet.

“Why would you need to know?” Callen asks, hoping Kensi is wrong and he can stretch their time. Exfil has surely noticed the plan didn’t succeed. “Why do you want to bring Hetty here?”

“She needs to right a wrong,” is all Torales says, eyes burning but voice composed.

“We can work something out.” Callen leans a bit more on Sam, desperate not to sway and appear weak. Guards surround them all sides in this cell confrontation, not that Callen would try something with the gun bare inches from Kensi’s forehead. “If you let them go, I’ll stay as bartering chip.”

“G!” Sam’s voice is harsh. “You wouldn’t dare.”

Torales doesn’t grin this time…but he does bow his head, as if in admission of defeat. His eyes are final.

So is his voice—“Kill her and the unconscious one.”

“No.” Callen barely gets the word out before the guards grasp Deeks and Kensi by their hair. They are yanked away with absolutely no fanfare. “ _No!_ ”

Kensi has devolved past the use of words altogether. Her face is a hurricane and she snarls an animalistic note of pure fury upon seeing Deeks skid past her. Injured as she is, she still manages to fight off her guard with a knee hooked up and around his neck.

Sam knees one guard in the groin before bringing his elbow down on the back of his neck—all one handed, the other making sure Callen doesn’t keel over. Callen kicks one, mostly to feel that he’s not dead weight here.

Torales simply takes out his own pistol, aiming it at Deeks.

_WHA-BANG!_

All three agents freeze. Their chests heave at the exertion demanded of already wounded, exhausted bodies. Adrenaline sings through their veins. 

Outside, another crash of thunder peals louder, right over top of them, a cruel ring in Callen’s ears. They are waiting… _waiting_ …watching for the mushroom cloud of red and grey brain matter to come gushing from Deeks’ curls.

Breathing. Shaking. _Panicking._

But there is no blood, and for a moment Callen can’t figure out why.

Then he sees the bullet embedded in the wall—not two inches to the left of Marty’s ear. It’s even ruffled his hair, carving a path, but Torales’ eyes are all for Callen.

Marty’s eyelashes flutter and for a moment slivers of cloudy blue glimmer. One by one, Deeks’ eyes alight on each of them. His face tightens, not coherent enough to speak or move and not asleep enough to hide from the pain.

“I’ll tell you,” Callen pants, out of sheer horror at what almost happened. “I’ll call Hetty to bring her here.”

“Perhaps later. You didn’t submit fast enough and for that you need to be taught a lesson.” The dictator sneers. “Take them away. You know the spot.”

Kensi and Deeks are dragged around the corner, their heels scraping in a putrid sound that shakes Callen down to the atoms of his soul. Deeks wails a groan of agony and distress Callen will take to his grave.

And his last sight of them is Kensi grappling with the hand in her hair. There’s a terrible ringing that he belatedly realizes is Sam, hollering and slamming the bars for all he’s worth.

Callen’s last sound of them are gunshots, exactly two.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Do you trust me, G?” Sam’s eyes aren’t intense, filled with that brotherhood-overcomes-all note Callen is used to like breathing air.
> 
> No—they’re _hurt_.
> 
> Callen’s mouth drops open, floored by something Sam seldom, if ever, lets him see like this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spoiler alert:
> 
> I've seen some concern over if this is going to be a death fic - you can rest easy knowing it won't! Nobody is dying in this fic except good ole Torales and aforementioned trust issues. It gets real close in chapter 5, but they all make it home. :)

‘The burden you choose to bear  
Keeping yourself from those who care,  
All of the things you keep concealed,  
One day are bound to be revealed—  
We paint a picture of ourselves that isn’t real.’

“Known and Loved” ~ Joel Ansett

Other men might have grieved at that point or screamed in anger and pain, but for half an hour after the gunshots—thirty excruciating minutes that delay the second hand’s ticking like it’s tethered to the earth—all Sam does is sit.

The bluster leaks out of him in one giant exodus and he blinks, as if entering a deep trance. He sits under the window, he stares, and he presses his foot into Callen’s where they sit across from each other. Callen tilts sideways next to the door.

“I’m sorry,” Callen whispers.

“We’ve been over this already, G.”

“I shouldn’t have provoked him, tried to buy time.”

Sam’s eyes glare a warning. “Not your fault.”

Neither man cries. Perhaps that’s abnormal, perhaps it’s not healthy, but other than some knot-in-his-throat swallowing, all Callen wants to do is the same thing Sam is actually doing—

He wants to _listen._

They sit completely still, exchanging not a single word more while they strain their ears. Atop the lash of rain, building to an even greater tropical storm, the amiable murmurs of guards on their shift change and the compound’s bustling close up shop for the night.

No sign of Kensi and Deeks. Of their corpses being moved.

In this way, nerve endings reached _far_ , both Callen and Sam can’t fight an undignified jump when loose pebbles around the room rattle.

Callen shoots upright, hand on the cold floor to stabilize his dizziness. Blotchy ink spots, lined with technicolour, float at the rim of his vision. Sam is already on his feet, squinting through the bars on the door.

At first that seems like the end of the strange noise, one they’ve never heard in the twenty four hours since they were caught. It’s a boom more than a sound, felt rather than heard.

_Maybe the compound doors are being closed or it’s from something being loaded into the weapons bay downstairs…?_

These are Callen’s best guesses—but then urgent voices begin to shout down the stairwell. He knows his theories are not correct anyway, that no doors could make such a sonorous vibration, too low to be heard. But such alarm in the guards’ voices sends an eerie ache through his chest.

_BOOM._

This time, the low _whomp_ ends in a crackle, like electrical whips twirled in the air. A bulb over the guard’s desk in the hall winks out, throwing the room into even greater darkness than before.

Sam gasps, above Callen’s head, and only then does he realize his partner has scaled the window again.

“What? Rescue?”

“G…I don’t know what’s going on—but the lower walls are on fire.” He sounds calmer than he should, though the whites of his eyes flash in the gloom.

“Fire?” Callen struggles to stand, nearly blacking out at the pain this causes his spine. “The fortress is made of stone.”

Sam hops down in a dexterous, panther-like move, as if he doesn’t have the mother of all concussions too. “Yeah, but the upper levels aren’t.”

His strong paw appears under Callen’s bicep and deftly levers him onto his own two feet, his other arm wrapped around Callen from the front instead of the back. Callen leans more heavily on Sam than he’s comfortable with, forced to brace a hand on Sam’s shoulder. They both wheeze from even that minor exertion, their chests bumping into each other.

“We should get out of here,” says Sam, voice thin.

“After you.”

And it strikes Callen as they start for the door what a clownish move this is. Where are they going to go? How are they going to escape before they’re burned alive? Sam’s dog tag, that would take weeks to wear down into a metal shiv?

The next _wh-BOOM_ shakes the structural walls. Dusts rains on them like pixie dust. Callen twists a hand in the shoulder of Sam’s shirt to keep from toppling and stiffens with realization. “That’s not just a gas fire. Those are explosives.”

“You might be right, but I hope for our sakes you’re not.”

Again and again a sound like distant fireworks knocks the compound. The fifth one buckles the floor of their cell, and smoke wafts in from the stairwell. Flag stones shuffle places by mere inches in their cobbles pattern, still enough to force Sam and Callen to grab at the wall for support. The floor feels like a carpet, in wave-like ripples that resettle the mortar in a macabre Jenga game.

_Clang!_

That’s a new sound. Both Callen and Sam snap away from it on instinct, muscles tight.

“G,” Sam says, at the same time Callen breathes, “the door!”

It hasn’t magically sprung open, but upon closer inspection the hinges warped where the wall’s buckling cracked around their bolts. Sam tries pushing the door open and its rusty scraping sound is both loud and dissonant enough to make them wince.

“I can kick it open.” Sam has one hand on Callen’s chest, the other in the small of his back, to shuffle him into a gentle prop against the wall. Callen scowls. He’s less effective than a potted plant, picked up and relocated on a whim. “Hang tight.”

“And once we get it open?” Callen lowers his head, brows up. “Then what?”

“Would you stop being such a Dolly Downer? What’s gotten into you today?”

“What’s gotten into _me_?” Something riles in Callen’s chest, something he hasn’t allowed himself to dwell on. Hurt. Fear. Abandonment. “What about your _Rambo_ impersonation back there?”

“What are you going on about—”

“I’m just saying, they’ll shoot us. We don’t have a weapon.”

Sam’s face hardens. “I am a weapon.”

Despite the kitschy words, a chill shoots down Callen’s inflamed spine at the tone he rarely hears from his partner. It’s usually used before someone dies. Violently.

He swallows down his emotions to deal with for another time, preferably when they’re not about to die. “Be careful.”

“Are you kidding me, G?”

“Job safety is important.”

“Everybody’s a comedian around here. You ready?”

Callen nods and braces himself, on the off chance one of the guards choking on smoke and running panicked around the hallway cares enough to accost them.

Sam backs up to the far wall, under the window, before oxygenating with a few deep breaths. Then he pushes off at a dead run.

At the last second, he lifts both feet and donkey kicks the hinges, slamming onto his back.

“You dolt!” Callen stands guard over him, as if that will help, to maintain the usual protocol. His heart hammers. “I didn’t expect you to do it like that!”

Sam clambers to his feet, hopping once like a prizefighter. “Might have broken something.”

“You think?” Callen snaps. He runs a bloody hand through his hair. “At least it worked.”

It worked a little _too_ well, Callen sees once they haul themselves out.

Callen refuses the offer of a ‘piggy back’ carry, though he appreciates that Sam, ever the optimist, can find some humour in all this. “I’m walking and that’s final.”

“You’re hobbling, is what you’re doing,” Sam fires back.

The return of their usual banter is short lived, mainly because they get a good look at the iron door and realize it landed on their head guard when Sam bull rammed it free of the frame. The mercenary’s crumpled body lies pinned by the door’s massive bars.

“Do you think he’s dead?” Sam asks, sounding a little stunned with himself.

“I don’t care.” Callen pokes Sam in the side to get them moving, which he can’t do under his own power at the moment. “We’ve got to be gone by the time this place goes up in smoke.”

“Too late.” Sam’s voice has switched to something jittery and alert, laced with adrenaline.

And if Callen had any doubts that stone would impede the burning of what wood and cloth line the inside of the fortress—he’s proven wrong by flames licking at the stairwell.

Sam stutters to a stop at the orange blaze, the screams of dying men far below. Callen’s stomach riots at the smell of burning flesh. He manages to swallow again and decides that if this is a rescue, it’s going even worse than theirs did for Rhea.

“Now what?”

The prompt gets Sam walking again, in the other direction. He swivels on his heel and this time Callen does vomit a bit, spitting it into their cell on the way by. Good riddance. Sam doesn’t spare the puking fit a second glance, just hitches Callen higher on his shoulder. His arm pinches Callen’s ribs.

“There’s a second staircase I saw in the blueprint file Hetty gave us.” Sam pants it out, coughing. “Around the head guard’s sleeping quarters…”

But that one is even worse than the first. They know that even before it comes into view, two long minutes later, because of the _oven_ heat that bakes the sweat to their skin.

Sam instinctively retreats. This stairwell is silent, and somehow that’s much worse than screaming.

They’re trapped and they confirm it to themselves in one moment of eye contact.

“Guards’ locker room?” Callen offers.

“Yep.”

They head that way by unspoken distress, mute panic they’re both too well trained to voice. Callen feels the first hack rise in his chest, at the foggy haze that has immersed the entire corridor. He coughs without opening his lips.

“G?”

“I’m fine. Keep moving.”

The locker room is the only door that’s not locked, chock full of ammo and spare uniforms and toiletries. Callen chose this room because it might have a secret, hidden staircase leading up to Torales’ quarters or some such escape.

But Sam heads straight for a window at the back.

“Sam?” Callen flinches around a particularly mangled breath that erupts against the lodged bullet. “What are you doing?”

Sam just stands at the pane-less window and looks down. _Waaayyyy_ down. Too far down for Callen’s taste. There’s no glass in this two-by-five monstrosity of an opening, so the storm whips rain at their faces, the first fresh air Callen has tasted all day, and chain lightning exposes their bloody faces in the night.

“There.” Sam points, once a third set of lightning reveals what he wants.

Callen waits with narrowed eyes until the sky flashes enough for him to see. “A puny dock? Are you insane?”

“We can jump, G. And it’s the yellow dinghy tethered to the dock that I want.”

Bewildered to the point of jostling his partner, Callen ignores the dinghy idea for now in favour of the obvious problem. “Sam, that’s a three-storey leap!”

“Into deep water,” Sam argues, and Callen is delirious that he’s trying to use logic right now. “This side of the fortress was built directly over the ocean, meaning we’ll be jumping into twenty feet deep waves, at least. They’ll buffer our fall.”

“Are you positive of that?”

Sam’s lips thin. “I studied sea charts of the area before we left LA. I’m as positive as I can be.”

“Great.”

Callen’s grousing is all an act and he’s aware Sam knows this. They’re sardine pressed together, so there’s no missing the trembles wracking Callen’s body. Nor is there any missing the growing heat at their backs, stones crumbling into the water as Torales’ house of cards falls down. The smoke is so thick that if Sam were standing an arm’s length away, Callen wouldn’t be able to see him.

He shakes his head. “We’re going to die.”

“Do you trust me, G?” Sam’s eyes aren’t intense, filled with that brotherhood-overcomes-all note Callen is used to like breathing air.

No—they’re _hurt._

Callen’s mouth drops open, floored by something Sam seldom, if ever, lets him see like this. It’s so agonized that he almost looks away.

When Callen takes a second too long to answer, Sam jostles _him_. As if this is the most urgent thing on the planet right now, even more than explosions and suicidal jumps and life threatening bullet wounds. “G? Do you trust me to get us home? Do you trust me with your life?”

“Always,” Callen replies without hesitation this time. “You’ll never let me down.”

Well, Sam is about to throw him down a window, but that’s splitting hairs.

And Sam’s entire body deflates. He covers his eyes with his hand for a moment; they stream, just like Callen’s, but for the first time Callen thinks maybe he’s finally processing something else. The same something he himself hasn’t dared voice, not once this past year of bitten-off words and lost time.

“I wish we could go back for their bodies.”

Callen’s whisper is nearly inaudible, but Sam hears him. He always hears him.

Sam’s hand drops. “Kensi talked about wanting to be cremated anyway.”

Maybe it’s a morbid comment, but Callen takes immense comfort from it. They may never find Rhea’s or the agents’ bodies amid the ash, whatever Torales did with them, but here and now they can honour their family in this tiny way.

Neither is naïve enough to say ‘goodbye’ out loud, but both Callen and Sam pat the stones on either side of the window. Remembering. Memorializing what they can in place of a headstone.

“Ready?” Sam asks for the second time in under an hour.

“No.” Callen goes limp to let Sam reverse their steps for the wind up. “But we’re out of options.”

* * *

_‘_ _We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.’_

_There is salt and there is white sand. It’s beautiful, like lamb’s wool and unspotted things. Ready for sacrifice, for the making of amends. Windy with the balm of a place he’s never seen._

_Souls forlorn, alabaster sails torn, and make-believe pirates who made you wish your children could be born without fathers to mourn…_

“G? Can you hear me?”

_Sweet dreams…ah, sweet—_

* * *

G Callen has fallen from a building exactly twice.

Once, during a case where he had to jump into a pool from a detached one-and-a-half storey balcony. The bruises and broken leg hurt like _hell_ and for all the effort, they didn’t even catch their suspect. He’d been lectured for a week straight by every single member of their team—Eric included.

The second time being right now. Twice as high as the first jump.

Contrary to how Sam badgers, Callen _does_ remember his training course, to cross his ankles and fold his arms over his chest for when he hits the water. Being airborne feels like it takes a lifetime, certainly long enough for Callen to let go of his death grip on Sam and perform the exact same motions Sam is doing.

One last explosion propels them out of the building.

They are completely weightless, torn free from gravity and its endless demands. Callen flies into a storm of Shakespearean proportions.

He is weightless…he is free…he is engulfed in a downy soft silence.

What they don’t teach you, though, about free diving into waves so turbulent they’d make Odysseus impressed—is how you’ll feel like you just lost all your teeth. Callen didn’t experience this the first time, other than the bone-jarring shock that always comes with hitting water, denser than air, at high velocity.

Now, however, the impact is so forceful that Callen instantly blacks out.

Pain wakes him. It’s in his lungs, from the water and bullet, in his joints, in the cue ball ache of his skull, even his tongue where he bit down on the edge.

He hasn’t been out long, but in barely three minutes something went wrong.

Not just his back, where the bullet definitely feels like it pierced something, but now he can’t see Sam.

The visceral mania, heart snapping _panic_ , this causes Callen catches him completely off guard. It’s the first time since he woke up in a cell this morning that he hasn’t been constantly within Sam’s line of sight. Callen whirls in the water.

And there, face down in the water ten feet away, is his partner.

He’s not moving.

“Sam!” Callen’s scream is lost to the wind. “ _Sam!_ ”

* * *

_‘_ _At school nobody ever taught us how to light a cigarette in a storm of rain…’_

* * *

The waves fight against Callen’s weak front stroke, his swimming less coordinated than a child against the torrent. His injured arm shrills in protest. Still, he pushes, spurred by the sight of the yellow dinghy tow rope wrapped around Sam’s wrist where he must have grabbed it.

“I’m coming!” Callen hacks up another mouthful of water. He just lost half of his team, his family, in one go—he cannot lose what he has left. “I’m coming, Sam!”

Suddenly, so fast he registers the warm squirt of his own blood before the pain, something swipes up the front of Callen’s chest. 

It’s the worst immediate pain Callen has ever experienced in his life.

He screeches, with such power it’s wrenched out of him before he can register the sensation. The storm wolf howls in reply.

* * *

_‘…Nor that it is best to stick a bayonet in the belly because there it doesn't get jammed.’_

* * *

Being flayed and sautéed alive in real time would hurt less than the strips of skin currently hanging off Callen’s chest, dozens and dozens of them. They punish him in cattle prod fritzes when the black spots in his vision fade and he can resist the dunking of the waves long enough to look down.

His shoe pushes off something course, bumping him over a long ridge of grainy, hardened sponge.

Callen realizes what it is just as he kicks free of it— _coral. A coral reef barrier around the base of the inlet._ And the waves dragged his torso roughly across it at incredible speed.

It must also be what Sam hit, dead on, when he landed. Once Callen swims up and rolls him on his back, then towards the dinghy, somehow miraculously afloat with rations still strapped to the bottom but spinning like a toy in the bathtub drain, he sees the unnatural angle of Sam’s shin. It must have snapped upon impact.

_I’m lucky I didn’t hit it too or we’d both be dead._

The word, four letters long and Callen’s entire life’s theme in one syllable, incites his panic again. He never panics. It’s not in his blood, not in his nature after one too many run ins with angry foster parents and people who never had the patience for a kid with so much baggage.

He is the _calm_ one on the team. The _ready for anything_ leader. The _knows a way out of every situation_ member who never leaves his people behind.

Where is he now? Even Callen feels like insisting upon an answer for his absence.

“Hang on.” Callen doesn’t know if he’s coaching Sam or himself at this point. “Just hang on.”

* * *

_Cigarette in the rain, fighting through the pain, a futile lesson in disdain, never a song of love with more than one refrain—_

“Grisha? Hey, you with me?”

“Not cool, brother. You’ve got to hang on a little longer. Okay? Callen?”

_Sweet dreams…ah, sweet dreams._

_And G Callen is alone._

* * *

“G? You with me?”

“Hmm?” Callen’s eyes snap off the rising sun to Sam’s worried face.

“I said, are you with me now?”

Callen looks up at him, grateful that his partner’s large body shades him from another day of merciless sun. He might almost take the storm yesterday night to this…this kiln of cheery sunlight. Both have blisters on their faces already. Salt aggravates their injuries, stinging the minor ones and cleansing the big spots, like Callen’s chest.

“I was thinking about your terrible plan.”

“Oh yeah?” Sam leans back, visibly relieved. “The one that kept you from barbecuing?”

“We nearly died, Sam. We should have found a way to scale to a lower window before jumping.”

“Uh-huh.” Sam sounds faux-unimpressed. But Callen can read the affection in his eyes. “I’ll remember that the next time I’m trying not to burn to death.”

Not that there would be a next time.

Sam reads this thought in his eyes, his own darkening. “We’ll find a way to get home. Just you wait.” But Sam’s voice hiccups over the word home and Callen finally, _finally_ sees his opening.

He tries again to take Sam’s hand and this time his partner lets him. “You’re my brother, you know that?”

“I do.” Sam curls their arms, snakes twined around a staff that can’t heal them this time. “I really do.”

“Brothers don’t get letting each other face things alone, right? That’s what you’re always telling me.”

“G, please—”

“And this should be…” Callen gargles up more blood. “And this should be no different.”

Sam hangs his head, though they’re compressed tight enough that personal space is a laughable concept and Callen can still see his face. It’s wretched now, as if Sam has aged ten years in the span of one night, all rigid clay statue lines damp with age and too much rain.

“You promised,” Callen whispered. “You promised me that’s what family does.”

“Don’t ask me something I can’t give, G.”

* * *

Callen’s world again comes down to colours and sensations:

Salt spouts attacking his eyes. A fortress-sized bonfire. Orange, black, sickly green lightning, pink coral…

The white of Sam’s bone.

“Come on.” Callen tries again to lift Sam onto the dinghy.

Success!

Or at least his torso is now sunk, limp, onto the makeshift boat. It’s heavier than it looks to maneuver, both Sam’s body and the dinghy. The inflatable rations container cushions his partner’s chest.

A wave tears Callen down, his fingers bloody on the oar ports to keep from drowning. “Come on, Sam!”

* * *

_‘_ _They are more to me than life, these voices, they are more than motherliness and more than fear; they are the strongest, most comforting thing there is anywhere: they are the voices of my comrades.’_

_Where is Sam? Why is he alone?_

_Blood of my comrade..._

* * *

“Come on, Sam…come on…”

Blood loss makes the world lurch even more than the storm. He pushes at Sam’s injured leg, the last part of him not on the dinghy, and hears a crunch of bone on bone in places they should never touch.

Callen hisses through his teeth, like he felt the pain instead, but Sam doesn’t wake.

Hauling himself up feels intractable. Callen tries anyway, arms shaking, injured bicep giving out after a moment so that his torso just hangs inside the boat, legs flailed like a ragdoll in the waves. He hovers next to Sam’s face, in awe that they’re both still alive.

Then it clicks—

Sam isn’t breathing.

* * *

_Part of a once in a lifetime dyad…_

* * *

“You bastard,” Callen growls, because he’s so scared his vision is blurry. He kneels on the floor of the dinghy and pumps at Sam’s chest with his good hand. Their bodies hurtle from side to side, play things for the boiling cauldron of open sea.

“You can’t just make up this plan and then…” He ceases the rant long enough to pinch Sam’s nose and breathe into his lips again. “…Leave me here!”

* * *

_Found my heart when it was sad…_

* * *

The storm actually has the audacity to dissipate by the time Callen gets a face full of warm water. Despite the fact he’s just been royally spit on, Callen laughs like he’s never done it before. His hand clutches at Sam’s.

The laughing spirals into crying, of course, far quicker than he expects. Not really tearful, messy weeping, but the dry sobs of a soul at its dead end.

“Sam…”

“G.” Sam’s whisper is raspy and he’s already passing back out, but he pulls G close so he can wrap one arm around his neck in a desperate clutch. “I've got you. Always, remember?”

* * *

_…And taught love to the soul of a nomad._


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You started dating Anna, just like I’d been steering you towards.”
> 
> “It’s not one or the other.” Callen doesn’t know why his body feels the need to shiver in such oppressive sunlight, but he can’t stop the reaction. “Gaining her doesn’t mean you have to go away.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks—it is Sam and Callen finally talking about their feelings.

‘My friend, you and I have come to an end.  
With our hands held high and our hearts still weak,  
This is where our faith and life will meet.’

“There Will Be a Day” ~ Strahan

“S…s’nice, is all I’m…I’m…”

“Hey.” An urgent poke to blistered skin. “Hey! G, you do not have permission to go. You got that? As acting team leader, I’m ordering you to stay with me.”

“Not ‘n charge.”

“I am now,” Sam huffs out. “You’re unfit for duty and I’m making sure you don’t tap out on me.”

Funny, that Sam once complained Callen couldn’t shut up on stakeouts and now here they are, Sam urgently prompting him to keep going with this inane story about a flower. To not give up. To not leave Sam alone on this dinghy with only Callen’s corpse for comfort before his own time is up.

It’s his greatest fear, and they both know it.

Not clowns, like Callen had joked, not drowning, not failing on a mission—no, Sam’s nightmares revolve around his partner dying. A person so important, they stopped using the title best friends a long time ago.

They’re something else now, something Callen has never permitted himself to name.

The orb of the sun is just free of the horizon when Callen takes his first rattling breath. Not that his breaths haven’t been rattling so far, of course.

But then he can’t draw another one.

Sam catches the lapse in the rhythm of Callen’s chest in an instant. Yet he doesn’t panic at this mirrored situation, not like Callen with his screaming and sobbing.

His lurch forward, however, is clumsy for the spry man. “G—”

Then he gets his turn to pump at Callen’s chest, just a quick thump of knuckles on the bony ridges of his sternum. They feel like ballast weights, pure titanium pin balls trying to pummel his bones into soup.

Callen loses a few hazy moments. His lips and extremities go numb even in direct sunlight.

The logical, SERE trained part of his brain knows what this is, can list in alphabetical order his own symptoms and the myriad of injuries, from the bullet still cozy and snuggled up against his lungs to the ragged slices along his chest, to the head wound that never really stopped throbbing. 

But none of it helps. None of it stops the lack of oxygen from weaving its enchantment, blood loss and the whispers of infection exacting their price.

After a second hit, Sam’s rough trick works—the blood unsticks from Callen’s lungs enough for him to stammer in a full breath, like a tiny car backfiring in pitiful little pants.

He coughs, nauseous from all the thick liquid he’s swallowed. It sloshes in his stomach, blood and water together. And that’s appropriate, somehow. On the miraculous chance someone finds his body before it’s fish food, the coroner will open him up and see the two greatest metaphors of his life. They’re better than any dog tags.

“Don’t do that to me.” Sam slumps. “You’ve given me enough scares at this point that I’m surprised I’m still alive.”

 _So am I_ , Callen thinks.

“Sam?”

“I’m here, G.”

But he’s not, and this agitates Callen more than any physical pain. More than the tight embrace of broken ribs or heat stroke or the special lack of sensation he’s been too stubborn to tell Sam about.

Like a mind reader, Sam quashes Callen’s mood even further by shifting. “I’m getting another cramp in my side. Can you scoot your legs over a bit?”

Callen croaks it out—“No.”

Sam stills. A hideous beat of silence slaps them both.

So far, they’ve taken turns: one curls their legs while the other stretches out for a while. A few hours in and they switch so that both have a chance to keep from getting full body Charlie horses or spasms in their exhausted muscles.

But with that one word, just one word, Sam finally stops moving. 

“G?” is all he asks, with such velvety tenderness that Callen almost doesn’t hear him. He’s not sure he deserves it.

“Can’t, uh.” He stiffens his chin and cuts off any emotion to his face. “Can’t feel my legs.”

It’s not a shock, not stacked up against the other horrors they’ve lived through in the last few days alone, but apparently it is the last in a long line for Sam.

He sets a broad palm on Callen’s knee, as if that will help, and Callen wishes dearly that he could savour the touch. Could feel the warmth Sam’s body is always radiating.

“When? When did you lose…?”

Callen looks up at puffs of clouds and longs to see his bird from yesterday. At Sam’s whisper, he sighs. “Just before sunrise.”

“Oh, G…”

Sam doesn’t say it or spew facts that they both know, and Callen is grateful. He’s seen bullet holes like his own before and this development was only a matter of time. The wound bubbles, boiling, under his back. It’s so feverish he’s surprised the dinghy doesn’t catch fire.

“Please.” His eyes wander, unfocused, over canyons of shattered honour on Sam’s face. “Sam, come here.”

He’s been repeating it all night and all morning, over and over and over and _over_ again—hoping against hope, against Sam’s very nature, that he’ll acquiesce. To fail so spectacularly is beyond what he’s ever had to deal with.

Callen knows it, but still he asks.

“I can’t.”

“Yes, you can.”

“G…it’s not right.”

“Course it’s not.” Callen’s voice is firm despite his spinning vision. “Is that what’s been eatin’ you all this time? That we aren’t supposed to be in this hell?”

Sam doesn’t reply and now the cold is in Callen’s chest cavity. He hiccups. “Sam. _Sam_ , I’m asking my friend, not the SEAL—please. Please come here. Don’t make me do this alone.”

“Not sure you need me anyway.”

Callen blinks. Sam’s confession is a hypodermic needle of fire syringed straight into Callen’s arteries. He stops breathing again, this time from emotion, from the prize match behind his eyeballs.

Callen has exactly one primary memory from being six years old—his eldest foster sister dragging him from his bed at five in the morning so they could climb a ‘mountain’ (the local treehouse) and watch the sun rise while eating peanut butter crackers. The crackers tasted stale, probably where she stole them from the school kitchen.

They always felt hungry those days.

Birds were barely up. It was cold, with slugs crawling across Callen’s patchy rubber boots, and the world smelled like the armpit of a root cellar.

He remembers her bruised knuckles offering him a cracker, teeth as crooked as her smile. He remembers feeling like this might be the last vestige of calm before the future rose up to meet him, both of them.

Here, in the open ocean of nowhere with Sam…it’s exactly the same. Callen is just a little boy waiting for the sun to rise, watching the world happen around him and trying to sustain himself on stale things.

It strikes him in one abrupt smack that Sam has been named too—and lost them.

He used to be _husband_.

Now he is _widower._

Sam is _friend_ and _protector_ and _brother-in-arms._

Sam is…Sam is _other half of a whole._ But people can get rid of their names, and Callen has begun to wonder if Sam doesn’t want this one.

With these words, however, the illusion shatters before he can even process the sudden honesty after hours of lying. It’s like stepping from an industrial freezer into the desert.

“Sam.” His voice breaks on the word and he has to try again. “Sam, I never wanted—”

“That was the point, right?” Sam’s body sits poised and balanced, as always, even in copious buckets of pain, but his eyes are restless. “Helping you grow, even if it means you don’t need me anymore, is the best thing I could do for you.”

Callen can’t shake his head anymore, but he pokes at Sam’s clenched fist. There are a million words streaming on his tongue, a Rebecca’s Room profusion of counter arguments for that.

But Callen doesn’t voice any. He just pats the fist through more breadcrumbs, where the prize fighter’s blood comes streaming from his eyes, the battle long lost.

“Is that what this has all been about? Pushing me away?” Callen’s mouth works now too. “These past few months you’ve been distant…won’t talk to me.”

“G, come on.” Sam’s torso pulls away to match the emotional distance between them and forget panic. Callen is hysterical. This isn’t how any of it should have gone, least of all the one thing that used to be so dependable. “You’re reading too much into—”

“Don’t sell me that.”

Sam stills again, though he doesn’t fully let go of Callen’s hand. It’s clammy and cool. Callen grips it just in case he tries to, fingernails digging into the back of Sam’s veins, thumb hooked around his knuckles. His partner barely reacts, other than to look sadly back at Callen.

“Do you remember that case when we had to stake out by a drug dealer’s yacht, in the boat? We took turns…took turns being submerged and sneaking underwater photos of Ryson’s operation.”

“Yeah, I remember. You were nearly hypothermic by the end, after all the swims back and forth.”

Callen taps at Sam’s chest, where he’s bent close. “Y…You made me cinnamon coffee.”

Sam’s brows knit. Then he seems to understand why Callen is bringing this story up now, of all times. The memory of sitting together under the blanket, on a boat, joking about how they slept better to the rocking of waves than at their respective houses. “G—”

“I will…”

Sam’s lips twist, even though Callen hasn’t finished his thought.

“I will _always_ need you.”

“No. You won’t, G. And that’s the way it should be.”

Then Sam does the last thing Callen expects for the situation—he smiles.

It is the most horrifying thing Callen has ever seen. He almost wants to vomit. The smile is a tad sorrowful, of course, but more than that it is _resigned._

“Shut up.”

“G?”

“I said shut up,” Callen growls, though his tears are a river now. “That’s why you agreed to go on this suicide run of a mission, isn’t it?”

Sam closes his eyes for a minute and that’s even worse, so Callen shoves him by the arm.

“Isn’t it?” he pushes, furious all of a sudden.

“You started dating Anna, just like I’d been steering you towards.”

“It’s not one or the other.” Callen doesn’t know why his body feels the need to shiver in such oppressive sunlight, but he can’t stop the reaction. “Gaining her doesn’t mean you have to go away.”

“It was selfish.” Sam’s chiseled whisper winds Callen. “I needed to see, needed to feel that you still…”

He doesn’t finish, but Callen has his own prescience for words. They’re past the apologizing phase, though Sam might as well put up a banner for the mutual guilt happening here.

The petals of Sam’s hand have opened at some point, relaxed enough for the two men to hold onto each other with a strength that belies their injuries. Callen relinquishes his death grip and each nail leaves a crescent indent, like mini scope bites.

Sweat mingles in the shaded hollow of their palms.

Callen thinks of the maps Sam studied before coming here and realizes, suddenly, that no experts have charted the most important thing of all. They have not studied or traversed the cartouches and peaks of Sam’s hand like Callen has. It is its own country, and it has housed the refugee of Callen’s trust longer than anyone else in his life.

There are highs and valleys, the rough crevasse of bullet scars, callouses, outcroppings of wrinkles that attest to years holding a weapon and picking victims up after being harmed by one.

And underneath it all is the volcanic thrum, a riverbed sustaining life in each heartbeat.

“You wanted to live vicariously through me.”

Sam looses a sigh of his own. “No, G. I needed you to be okay. To be taken care of just in case I…”

He doesn’t say it, because it’s almost comical coming from the situation they’re in now. The ‘d’ word is still off limits.

“Even if I was…gone,” Sam amends, “I wanted to make sure you’ll always be taken care of.”

“Be loved,” Callen finishes, lacking his usual distaste for raw sentiments. Probably thanks to the fact that he’s in the double digits of how many breaths he has left. They have to count.

“Yeah.” The word is grey, fabric left out in the sun and weathered to the point of desaturation. “Yeah, G. You deserve better than an old badger like me.”

The shivers run up into Callen’s teeth so they chatter. “It doesn’t get any better than you. Without you, I’d retire, you know that?”

Sam swipes a thumb under his nose. “No, you wouldn’t.”

“Can’t replace the best, not even with a new partner.”

Callen pretends not to see the way Sam’s face falls even further, how emotionally strung out they both are. They are silent for a time, floating in the windless doldrums of a cloudless morning.

G’s lips curve up. “Did you just call yourself a badger?”

“I’ll hurl you off this dinghy myself. See if I won’t.”

They laugh, even though the pain of it nearly causes him to black out, and it manages to last longer than thirty seconds in a way Callen didn’t think was possible. He realizes it might be the last time he even gets to laugh, so being the one to give Sam his last moment of amusement feels like being handed a trophy.

Then Sam _says_ the last thing Callen expects—

“There’s so much I wanted to do.”

And at last, _at last_ , Sam lays down on his side facing Callen.

It takes some shimmying and swearing on both their parts from the discomfort, but it’s still the most beautiful thing—Sam stops fussing over signal flares and homemade compasses to just _look_ at Callen, to be one hundred percent present when he goes.

He looks, his eyes a lighthouse fixed in one direction, and a peace beyond quantifying sweeps in fizzy particles through Callen’s body.

Their bodies jam together inside the pillbox of the dinghy, knees curled up so they both fit twined around each other.

If every single piece of gold in the world was shaved down into flakes and set out in a carpet of blinding splendor, Callen thinks it might, _might_ , capture something of the way Sam’s eyes look right now. They are heavy, a bullion of faith that broke Callen’s scales within a year of meeting him, and so breathtaking that his throat stings.

“Me too.” Callen works up a smile of his own and it must be equally terrible for the way it makes Sam’s hand tighten. “But we still can.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Why not?”

Sam wipes some blood away from Callen’s face, where it runs between his dry lips. Those dulcet callouses rub at sensitive skin around the blisters. “We’ll go see my son’s graduation.”

Callen closes his eyes, trying to picture it, before Sam pats his cheek to keep them open. _Not yet_ , the gesture says. “He looks great. He’s got your military tank shoulders.”

“He sure does.”

“There are flower petals from the DC cherry blossoms.”

Sam looks off in the distance. His glistening skin isn’t so flushed anymore, pasty to the point of looking like a corpse and shivering with infection and blood loss. “Yeah, I see that.”

“And we’ve got a seat by the front, so that he can’t miss us when he walks across the stage.”

“We’ll embarrass him by taking too many photos.”

“You mean _you’ll_ take too many photos—I’m the cool, hip uncle. Remember?”

“My diving watch could be his gift.”

“That’s a lousy graduation gift.”

Sam ignores this with the ease of long practice. “And I’ll walk my daughter down the aisle if she gets married.”

“I can see it. I can _see_ it, Sam. She looks gorgeous, all sparkly and smiling…”

“She does, just like Michelle.” Sam’s eyes are bright.

“…But only if I get to help reception party plan.”

“Of course. You and Deeks go overboard on the budget and ridiculous decorations despite my protests, as usual.”

Callen doesn’t miss Sam’s use of present tense but he plays along, the scene unfolding like a cinematic vision inside his head. “And their kids are running around playing with balloons.”

“I’m not sure Kensi and Deeks wanted kids.”

“Indulge me for a second.” Callen grins, and this time it feels blindingly real. It’s as if someone reached down and lit his soul on fire, back to the way they were in the beginning, almost two decades ago when he met Sam. “Say a boy and a girl.”

Sam gets into these not-memories too, his voice stronger. “We’ll do Saturday cook outs on the boat.”

“Eric can make some of his famous sushi! I’ll give him hell for bringing something raw to a barbecue but eat most of it before you can.”

Sam snorts. “Leaving me to rummage through leftovers in the fridge the next day when you aren’t looking.”

Their game continues over the next few hours, Sam and Callen living a whole life on this dinghy, describing in detail their best case scenarios. Callen can almost taste it, the joy of a life lived out with these people.

It is only once the sun is almost at its noon zenith that Callen picks up on a running theme. Sam hasn’t yet, still waxing on about a ‘memory’ of how he’ll teach Kensi and Marty’s kids to fish, watch them be raised by Uncle Sam and Uncle Callen too, this four-parent family.

“It’s beautiful,” Callen whispers. “All of it.”

Their faces are mere heartbeats apart, but Callen can feel the distance yawning, something inside of his body growing icy…shutting down…

“I wanted to grow old.” Sam’s first few tears fall only now, only once he sees the foggy light in Callen’s eyes. “I wanted _us_ to grow old.”

“On the boat.”

Sam’s forehead creases, at the same time that he reaches out to smooth Callen’s with his thumb. “What? We are growing old on a boat.”

A small popping sound breaks through the gunk in Callen’s larynx. He fists his other hand in the torn chest of Sam’s shirt, and the riverbed heartbeat is under his knuckles too.

Sam kneads his fingers into the back of Callen’s neck like dough.

In, out. In, out…

“Sam.”

“I know. Hey, I know.”

“Sorry ‘m…I’m leavin’ you.”

Sam’s lips are a mess now. “You might not be. And I’m sorry I can’t tell Anna you love her.”

“She probably knows. Haven’t…haven’t said it to her.” Callen reaches up to clasp the wrist by his ear, pleased to go with two fistfuls of his partner. “It’s you ‘m not so sure about.”

Sam gets that _look_ , the one right before he lectures some unsuspecting drug runner kid or mouths off at a government official. “You listen here. I wouldn’t change one jot of how this went down. Do you understand me?”

Callen stares at him, too spent for a comeback.

Sam breathes out, slow. “I’d do it all over again in the sense of backing you up. I should never have pushed you away—I know you only agreed to this Rhea case because of me.”

“I should never have doubted that you still…wanted…wanted this…”

Callen’s breaths are a whistle now, like Deeks’ on the cell floor.

Then a curious thing begins to happen: Callen looks up at the horizon and suddenly can see _through_ it. Someone has cut away several petticoats of stratosphere tulle to make it sheer and glittering.

The blue of the sky mingles with refracted starlight through Earth’s atmosphere, as if he and his vision are floating between universe and planet to images he can’t place.

The long-lost memory of a high school English class and the novel they studied that year comes floating back…the sound of his teacher reading it on hot September afternoons…sweet dreams, ah…

“G.” Sam’s voice goes sharp. “ _Hey!_ Don’t you dare, G!”

“How w’ld it end?” Callen’s voice comes out like individual grains of sand, small and coarse. He’s choking on those stars, lungs filled up with cosmic dust from a world and colours he’s never seen.

“What?”

“How would…we…?”

There are figure eights whirling in the cosmos now, around the sunlight like playful quarks and rings. Callen wonders how he ever though the universe is static.

He can hear pulsing underneath the planet’s crust, in harmony with the whales and the atoms in Sam’s eyes and dichroic symphonies of light. They’re perfectly layered. They’ve all rehearsed this song since the beginning of time.

“We’re old and fat.” Sam’s tears water the chapped places on Callen’s face. “With no more dying people to worry about.”

“I c’n…see it…”

“And…” Sam lets out one very long breath that sounds like he’s gone over a shallow set of speed bumps, uneven. “And you’ll irritate me to no end with your stupid Tootsie pops.”

“Yeah?” Callen hears the permanence in that and some of the ice thaws.

“Yeah, G. We’ll travel the oceans together, take naps along the coast and fish for our supper.”

Now a close, fluttered trill ads to the mix, a piccolo of approaching hope. The low _thud thud thud_ of a kettle drum.

“And watch the fireworks.”

G Callen smiles, for he can hear it now, how his own body has been part of the score all along. His molecules vibrate in sync with every dog and oak tree and volcano.

Sam’s voice begins to fade, Callen hearing him through the giant metal tube of fading black. “And…we’ll host the Blye-Deeks kids on weekends, when they grow up and protect the world instead of us…”

“S’m?”

“I’m here.”

But Callen himself is not, he knows now.

This time, he’s the one leaving. That’s new. He always gets left behind, abandoned, shoved away ‘for his own good,’ whether it’s his father or Anna or even Sam this last year.

Callen closes his eyes and when they open, Kensi kneels over him instead.

The blood is gone from her teeth, smile radiant enough to compete with the sun at her back. She’s even haloed, smooth white wrapped around her auburn tresses, flying free in the wind.

The beat of wings brush cool on Callen’s face, as does a strange flurry of motion behind her, her hand soft and whole where it strokes his cheek. She waters him too, brown eyes lit up nearly chestnut.

“H’me?”

“Yes, Grisha.” She laughs, a wild sound. “We’re going home.”

Callen’s last memory is Sam’s bitter weeping…begging him to stay.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More hands, but these Callen knows better than a lullaby. They slide gently under his shoulder and the back of his head to pull him close to a burly chest. He is rocked from side to side.
> 
> Kensi told the truth after all— _home. I am home_.

‘Waking with eyes closed from technicolour dreams,  
Crystal kaleidoscopes were singing blue in green…  
I was shown a few things I’d been getting wrong—  
She told me I’m a good man and have been all along.’

“Figment of Your Mind” ~ Bruno Major

Hands.

Hands smother him.

Not just hands, but fingers and nails, bobbins winding him with their plastic over his face. Cinched tight by thread and wheel. Hands that won’t stop pinching, grasping, shoving, swiping, piercing, adjusting, pulling, pulling, pulling, pullingpulling _pulling_ —

“Agent Callen?”

But not the right hands. Not the ones that Callen has charted to the point he can decipher them in his sleep.

_WHOMP WHOMP WHOMP._

Twirling wings…a window above Kensi’s face…

“Get me a defib!”

“What,” Kensi protests. “You want to do it _here_?”

“Do we have any other choice?”

“How far is—”

“Blood transfusion—”

“Is there enough time? Can we make it to the ship’s OR in time?”

_Where is Sam?_

“Probably not…but we owe it to them to try.”

* * *

_‘Sweet dreams though the guns are booming.’_

_The quote, from a book in high school English Callen never even bothered to finish, flitters around his thoughts in shiny copper fragments. Like someone blew up a fountain full of coins and down they come. Scarlet and rusty brown catch the light, new and old. Pennies of forgotten dreams without value to buy any set piece from them._

_He is here and he is nowhere and he is standing on a beach full of…_

_Red sand?_

_Callen looks down and the red gushes from him, from arteries let loose to sunlight. It waterfalls down his face, his chest, warm and steaming along the tracks of his shins._

_That doesn’t seem right, his panic stirring afresh. Where did Kensi go? Why is the sun so quiet? Would she really leave him alone?_

_Sam?_

_But no one answers. His dreams aren’t so sweet and the guns have long since stopped booming._

“You with me? It would be a jerk move of you to die now after we came all this way.”

_Blood soaks the sand, the ache in his empty hand, with the only working heart in the land—_

“Get me an emergency shot of epinephrine!”

_Sweet dreams…ah, sweet dreams…_

_Sam? Where are you? Talk to me!_

_SAM!_

G Callen is alone.

* * *

“We need another IV over here! _Now_!”

“Why is the big one fighting us?”

An angry sigh. “I don’t know.”

_Sam? Sam, please._

The insistent fingers and their grip are gone, and this feels far worse. He is alone. Always alone in this casket of loss, outfitted just for him and padded to prevent any escape. It is quiet here, so quiet it rakes the inside of his skin in brackish stripes.

_Th-thump…th-thump…th-thump…_

_Booming, those are the guns booming._

“Agent Callen? Can you hear me?”

_Th-thump…th-thump…th—_

“His heart stopped! We’re losing him!”

* * *

If someone were to hand-write a list of every single memory that formed in one instant, so outlandish no one would ever believe it—Kensi Blye would easily have over a dozen pages to her name.

She always shudders to think what Hetty’s must be like, those _are you serious, are you actually for real?_ experiences and witnessed moments, stolen by the eye’s camera whether one likes it or not. Her friendship with Frank Sinatra comes to mind…

This is a moment that Kensi would very much love to never remember again.

Her presence alone is one never ending breach of protocol. Just to stay on the medivac helicopter required her to grab a black ops sergeant by his chin and shake it, spitting like an alley cat and furious at the very idea that they would go investigate the yellow dinghy without her.

Hetty’s pull on the decision hadn’t hurt.

Now _there_ was a phone call that will go down in Navy legend.

They assured this feral agent that it was a million-to-one longshot and Kensi shouldn’t get her hopes up, but she had convinced them to let her ride along anyway.

Somehow— _somehow_ there they were.

Exactly where the scientific readings said they would be. Sam and Callen curled up together on a battered dinghy, so far gone they didn’t even hear the helicopter hover overhead or a rope ladder drop.

Taking Callen’s face in her hand, right as he uttered that one aching word and flatlined, will go down in the ‘worst memories of my life’ category.

Kensi lost sight of the boys and her husband once they made an emergency landing on the American aircraft carrier currently stationed off the coast of Hong Kong.

And now…and now two hours later she’s out of bed, throbbing in so many places that her body is one giant klaxon of pain—

But snarling at any nurses who dare approach her. Shattered hand cradled in a sling against her chest, covered in second degree burns all down her side and face, Kensi bares her teeth until the press of people part.

A menagerie of splints in strange shapes hold her finger joints together, pitiful reconstructions of bone alignment until the swelling goes down enough for surgery. Her disconnected joins swim in a soup of inflamed tissue.

Kensi is more animal than human right now. Though she’s aware enough to recognize this, she doesn’t care.

She doesn’t care that she wasn’t supposed to be on a secret mission to terrorist-controlled Taiwan just like she doesn’t care that she it wasn’t protocol to be on the medivac helo while injured, or to be on the carrier, or to be out of bed.

She doesn’t _care_ that this is a restricted ICU wing.

Sitting idly by while her family suffers is unfathomable.

Kensi’s not sure she cares about anything anymore. Nothing but the figure currently huddled up on the floor down the hall.

One brave nurse tries to intercept. “Agent Blye—”

“Ayygh!”

Again, Kensi forgoes words for a harsh roar. Without even glancing at the nurse, she holds up a hand to silence her and marches down the hallway as fast as injuries will allow. Marines jump out of the way at Kensi’s blazing eyes and taught jaw.

The source of her urgency is a crowd in the ICU’s large reception room, all squatted down. They talk over each other, arguing about cc levels for a sedative injection. 

“Hey!” Kensi uses her first actual word since waking and is gratified by the sight of eight plus medical experts jumping. “Get back, all of you. Make a hole.”

It hurts her face to talk. Local anaesthetic, that they gave her on the helicopter, has long since worn off, though the IV drip she tore out of her arm five minutes ago and its steady supply of morphine starts to kick in. Its icy effects reduce some of the tooth-cracking tension along her neck.

Kensi bodily shoves an ER surgeon out of the way and he skitters.

“Agent Blye—”

“You shouldn’t be out of bed—”

“Hematoma—”

“Can we get some privacy?” she asks over top of her doctor, who is winded from running down the hall when he found his patient gone.

“Actually, no.” Kensi’s doctor, a young Japanese man, frowns when he eyes lines of pain on Kensi’s forehead and the way her splinted hand shakes. “Your wounds aside, he needs to be taken in for immediate surgery if we’re to save his leg.”

“I know, just…” Kensi rolls her jaw once, and the sting feels good. A tiny semblance of control in this night terror that refuses to be over. “Just let me talk to him.”

The doctor ponders that for a few moments longer than Kensi is comfortable with, but eventually he nods. “Alright, guys. Break it up. Let’s give the agents some space—and get a psychologist on standby.”

At last, the remaining doctors and marines part, standing from their crouch. The crowd fades into the background.

And there, in all his bleeding glory, is Sam Hanna. Plastic dinner knife in hand.

How he managed to filch it off one of the staff while concussed and wavering with blood loss, Kensi has no idea. He’s too far gone to really use it, slumped against the wall, IV line dragging from his arm like a leash, shard of bone splinted and wrapped but still weeping blood everywhere, eyes feral just like hers. A savage creature of savage rage.

Crimson pools onto the tile. The droplets are silent while they fall, the loudest sound Sam’s uneven breathing.

It flips a toggle inside Kensi and her shoulders slump. The primal, granite cast of her face morphs back into something human.

She sits cross legged in front of Sam, her bare toe just shy of touching his.

“Hey, big guy. We’re okay. I’m here, it’s just Kensi. Just you and me.”

The blue scrubs on them both are too small and too short, so she gets a bird’s eye view of Sam’s infected leg. Kensi grimaces, knowing that according to all textbook definitions, he shouldn’t be conscious right now. The wound puffs with insidious black lines.

Sam knows what’s going on, not dissociating like the staff seem to believe. His eyes lock on Kensi with devastating awareness.

But he reaches one hand up to clutch at his chest and looks shocked to find nothing there.

To find Callen’s hand gone. Navy medics had to pry his fingers off one at a time.

This is the moment Kensi has been waiting for, the reason she broke every protocol in the book by barrelling down the hallway while still a critical patient herself. This is her cue to say something comforting. She wants to reassure Sam that they’re all alive—for now—and it’s going to be okay so long as they’re together.

Kensi is the heart-guardian of this team. Watching from a high vantage if they need to let their guard down.

It is _her_ job to remind the boys that they’re allowed to fall apart, to block out the world when it gets too much. Just like it’s Marty’s to be a mouthpiece and Callen’s to face the gritty realities so they don’t have to. Just like it is Sam’s to protect what they love.

But something snuffs out in Sam’s gaze, something she’s never seen before…

“He.” Sam kneads at his chest. “He left me.”

…And Kensi simply hides her face in her hands. A puppet snipped of its strings.

She can’t cry, _hasn’t_ cried since this all started save when they found the dinghy, and she doesn’t now.

Instead, a split screen horror movie, Kensi’s body begins to shake. She wishes, desperately, that there were tears after all. Her chest piston fires once. Twice, three times. It releases a wretched, bottom of the earth sob that isn’t human either.

On the fourth, a broad hand appears, bloody, swallowing hers in a trembling grip. She keeps it close to her face and uses his knuckles to wipe a hair out of her eyes. Sam smells like salt water, underscored by that metallic tang of blood.

She and Sam are unable to speak for a long time.

Not _don’t want to_ or _are comfortable enough with each other to be silent_ , though both are also true—but completely and utterly wrecked of speech. There are no words for this kind of grief.

Sam’s heartbeat is too fast, and he’s going to need surgery within the hour to ensure he doesn’t lose his leg from the knee down…yet this too Kensi pushes aside.

She doesn’t _care_. Why can’t the world see that?

Leaning so far over her ribs protest, Kensi presses her forehead to Sam’s fingers. They unfurl for a moment to run between the bridge of her nose and down her mouth, careful not to touch the burns along her forehead.

It is only with this gentle caress that Kensi finally knows she’s safe.

They are experienced agents, all of them, even Deeks. They have been held hostage and shot, nearly died more times than Kensi can count. _That_ would be a list.

This prisoner of war experience wasn’t even particularly grisly, threat wise; nobody tried to harm them in unsavory ways. They were captives for just over a day. The torture was minimal compared to other cases.

But like Sam’s eyes, something new has plaited between all four of their bodies. This time was different. Vastly different.

This time Kensi’s ability to compartmentalize is obliterated, crushed into a million microscopic fragments. She feels like she’s been blown apart and glued back together by a child.

_That’s not far from the truth._

She knows what a psychologist will call this when they inevitably have to face the music of what happened in that fortress. The word lurks under every mandatory evaluation and on Hetty’s face when she watches the team go for a drink together after a tough case—

‘Codependence.’

Maybe that word drags them into trouble more times than it’s helped but then again, Kensi doesn’t care. She serves her conscience and this team-family first.

Sam looses a sob of his own. “They tore me away from him after he flatlined again. I want to see him.”

Kensi squeezes his hand. So that’s what the yelling and alarms were about. “You tried to pull a jailbreak, huh?”

Sam sways in place and drops the knife. There’s a nasty word for this too, one EMTs love so much.

_Shock._

“I need to be there, Kens. I need to…know that he’s…”

Kensi turns to the doctor where he kneels a few feet behind, his eyes suspiciously shiny. Her voice comes out harder than a millstone. “You kept them apart? After what they’ve been through?”

The doctor’s downturned mouth is solemn. “I’ll remedy that shortly, if…when Callen stabilizes. I apologize, Agent Hanna.”

Sam doesn’t hear him either, though his grip on Kensi is so constricted now that her fingers lose sensation. He looks through Kensi for a moment.

Then, suddenly, right in the face. “You saved our lives. Are you okay?”

Kensi’s lips quiver for a moment. She stills them, refusing to let her mind wander to her last sight of Marty. There will be stories to swap later, what really happened in that compound, but right now her urgency to see Callen matches Sam’s. If he’s even alive. “I’m better off than you three, that’s for sure.”

This truth seems to get everyone moving, even Sam. He can’t stand on his own, though he shies away from a burly nurse’s touch. That’s new. Kensi blinks at the standoffish behaviour and takes his elbow instead.

It’s pitiful, the blind leading the blind, but between Kensi and a female orderly that he responds to with less guarded behaviour, they get Sam into a wheelchair.

When he finally releases her good hand, it’s like being electrocuted. Like losing them both all over again.

Kensi inhales a breath that lifts her stomach and counts backwards from thirty, until she’s positive she won’t break down. The nurse just takes one look at her and gets another wheelchair.

“I’m fine,” Kensi grinds out.

“Sit down, ma’am, or I’ll push you in.”

Kensi doesn’t argue a second time.

In an oddly quiet procession, the two agents are wheeled to the manual elevator and up three floors towards a surgical suite. A large window looks over the operating room, where Callen is being kept alive by a ventilator, continuous blood transfusion, and a whirlwind of doctors.

He’s been turned on his side in an unnatural position for the emergency surgery, to avoid aggravating the infected wounds along his torso or the bullet currently being fished out of his back. It takes three OR attendants just to hold him in place, a delicate balance even if they weren’t fighting for his life.

“His brain activity was off the charts, before we anaesthetized him,” the doctor informs them, quiet.

Sam turns to him. “Meaning?”

“Meaning he was in distress and aware of his surroundings more than we expected.”

Kensi and Sam don’t ask the doctor for details, about either this concerning statement or the surgery, and he doesn’t offer.

Callen faces away from the window, but a camera records on the opposite side of the suite. They watch a TV mounted in the corner, being fed its footage in real time. Callen’s face, though sedated, comforts Kensi.

The tiny viewing room is dark, like a theatre, and for this Kensi is grateful. She finally stops playing watchdog over her boys.

“You’re here.” It seems to hit Sam just now, even though he rode in the medivac helo with her and was mostly conscious for it, even though they just sat on a hospital floor falling apart together.

He stares at Kensi like he’s never seen her before. His pupils are blown wide, too dilated even for this dim room, concussed to high hell like the rest of them. “You made it! They didn’t shoot you…”

And this time Sam is the one bereft of conscious thought, shaking while Kensi rubs his back.

“No,” she whispers. Low and soft like a prayer. “No, they didn’t.”

“I thought I was the only one left. I _can’t_ be the only one left. I can’t. I thought…”

“I’m here.” Kensi tilts towards Sam, propped up by the arm of the chair, and rests her forehead on his big shoulder. “We’re all together, Sam.”

_Together. Here. Unabandoned, no team member forsaken._

She doesn’t say _alive_ , for she can’t promise that. Not for any of them—she is fully aware that if Callen dies on this table, so will Sam.

Her stomach turns as forceps begin their dig into Callen’s spine. Purple veins snake away from the wound, a mauve ring around one side of the hole.

“He flatlined.” Sam heaves out a splatter of a breath. “Three times, Kens— _three times_.”

It should be strange to see Sam unravel this way, disoriented and delirious and panicking with all the finite precision of a matador cape, but it’s not. He looks on the outside the way Kensi feels inside her chest.

If any of them ever deserved to lose their cool, it’s now.

Kensi strokes Sam’s chest in a slow circle, a futile attempt to calm him down. “I know. Sam, hey, I know. I was there too.”

“He _died_.”

“Sam—”

“He was legally dead.” Sam pounds on his good knee, the doc rushing to intercept. “He might have died not knowing how much I…thinking I didn’t want him anymore.”

The doctor is a twig of a man compared to Sam’s bear-like body. This doesn’t stop him from pulling on the fist. “Easy, Agent Hanna. Are you ready to be prepped for surgery now?”

Sam doesn’t answer, the fight leeched out of him. He slumps in the chair and Kensi may not know what happened on that dinghy or what they talked about in Callen’s final moments of consciousness—but here, from what she can see of the anguish in Sam’s eyes…she knows they left something behind on it.

“He knows. Hey, Sam—Callen knows. He’ll always trust in how much you care about each other.”

Sam’s fingers curl into a dead spider shape. Kensi flounders, sensing that she’s not getting through to him.

And when a heart monitor suddenly _shrieks_ a flat note, too long, Kensi finally cries.

For a fourth time, doctors defib Callen’s failing body. This particular round of horror is apparently from a seizure that’s causing him to asphyxiate on his own blood.

Hot tears dribble over her eyes, watching doctors suction gunky brown flakes from inside Callen’s lungs. Kensi quivers all over, so hard it rattles the wheelchair. She can’t feel her fingers or toes, can’t see beyond the world’s vertigo spin.

 _“H’me?”_ Callen asked Kensi when she landed on the dinghy floor, and she gave him an honest answer. Incredulous that he could even muster that one word. It was the truth to say they were going home, for home is each other. 

But this is a poison tipped sword. For if Callen goes, none of them will be able to find home again.

“Please,” Kensi breathes, not even sure who she’s talking to. “ _Please_ …”

As for Sam?

They have to sedate Sam after all. Doctors hear his screams all the way down the hall.

* * *

“…And I mean hey, man, look. I’m just saying. It’s dumb, right?”

A shuffle of waxy paper.

“You’re a cultured guy, but you know nothing about a good V8 engine. Well…neither do I. But that’s beside the point.”

The squeal of a wooden chair leg on linoleum.

“You’ve got your horsepower or you’ve got your engine boosters but neither one is enough to win the race on its own, you know what I—”

“What are you doing out of bed again?”

Papers snap shut. “Uh…”

“Come on.”

“I don’t even like street racing,” the warm voice whispers. “But Kens has got me reading this stuff and I have to keep up the charade that I know what I’m talking about. There’s nothing else to do in ICU anyway, am I right? You have to be at least as bored as me. If you wake up, I’m thinking we can do some sick wheelchair races.”

Beeping. Lots of beeping. It’s slow, like the flash of a far away shoreline.

“I hope you’re feeling better in there, brother.”

* * *

“Agent Callen…I know you don’t know me. But I just want to thank you. Your team is the reason I’m still alive and going home with Dad. I wouldn’t have survived without you.”

* * *

“Were you rambling to him about cars again?”

“Some of this stuff is…interesting.”

“Uh-huh. Nice try, Deeks.”

“Worth a shot.”

“Unbelievable—just for that I’m going to braid what hair you have left into a knot.”

A laughing gasp. “You wouldn’t dare. Not once you get a look at this face!”

“It _is_ pretty cute. Though you’re not supposed to be talking yet until docs take the stitches out.”

“When has that ever stopped me before?”

The rumble of a massive engine. A balmy wind across his cheek before a flower touches it. “You gotta wake up or my husband is going to drive me insane before this flight touches down in LA.”

Silence.

“You…you just have to wake up, alright?”

* * *

“I’m sorry, son…I’m…”

More warmth, but this is different, sharp and full of salty regret, precious diamond fragments cascading across his cheek. The woman’s voice catches. “I’m _so_ sorry.”

* * *

Something wet, falling on the wrinkly canvas that coats his body.

“I’m here. I’m here and I’m not leaving. Not ever again, G. Some things are going to change starting today.”

That voice. He knows that voice, has known it since the day he got a new name.

The world floats in soupy waves, cradling his body. That same name takes a long minute to register, a hummingbird that flits out of reach. Coy. Elusive. A familiar feeling, really.

Then—ah! G Callen. That’s who he is.

Callen can’t open his eyes, but he breathes against plastic over his face in a pant.

“G? Hey, G! Are you with me? You finally waking up in there to match those crazy EEG readings?”

_Yes. What do you think I’m trying to do?_

“S…Sam.”

That one word, three letters and a single syllable, costs Callen a fortune of energy to push out. He’s tired already. It’s worth it in exchange for a presence drawing closer.

More wet. More stuttered laughter.

More hands, but these Callen knows better than a lullaby. They slide gently under his shoulder and the back of his head to pull him close to a burly chest. He is rocked from side to side.

Kensi told the truth after all— _home. I am home._

Callen can’t smell Sam, not around the oxygen mask, yet the hand around his neck kneads.

In, out. In, out…

“I’m here, G.”

This time, so is Callen.

* * *

_Sweet dreams, ah…these are sweet dreams._

And G Callen is _not_ alone.

* * *

_‘_ _I am no longer a shuddering speck of existence, alone in the darkness—I belong to them and they to me; we all share the same fear and the same life…I could bury my face in them, in these voices, these words that have saved me and will stand by me.’_


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Suddenly Callen hears it. The music is faint, barely there, but after what they just lived through, he’d know it anywhere:
> 
> That trill of approaching hope.
> 
> It’s _Sam_. It’s been Sam all along.

‘Freedom rushed over me like an ocean  
As your loved ruined me to the core.  
I’ve never died but if you forced me to guess,  
This was me raised to life, dead no more.’

“Stay With Me” ~ Cody Fry

The very first sensation to enter stage left is not a puckish voice chattering about cars or sunlight or the beeping of a machine. It is not lips touching his face.

No, the first thing to register are _bees_.

Callen’s brow knits. He’s not sure what this means at all, the swarming wings over his torso and mountain ridge of his spine.

It is odd, he thinks, that the bees congregate along his upper half but not his legs. They seem to stop just above belly button as if at an invisible line. They’re not stinging and the feeling isn’t unpleasant, but it’s not quite right either.

He realizes why a minute later, the peaceful lack of sound that would be impossible if a hundred or so insects were working away along his skin.

For a while he just lays. Breathes. Listens to the low drone of voices and the sound of wind in the trees outside a window. The way a fresh breeze crests through the flap of curtains and…

And a long sigh.

Callen doesn’t even need to open his eyes to identify the sound, though he does.

It takes two tries for the light, meager as it is, not to incinerate behind his lids. Callen makes no sound, though the crease between his brows is deep now, everything sharper and granier than it should be thanks to pain in his back.

“G? Buddy, you with me?”

On the third try, they stay open.

He shifts to looks out that window first, set in the opposite wall across from his feet, to a windy but cloudless morning. It brims with homely cheer, and he’s clearly on a ground floor to be able to see individual birds in the dogwood tree outside. They flit around with open beaks, singing.

 _I can barely hear them._ Callen’s breath stops. His throat aches with this otherworldly loss, bereft of being able to see the universe’s cogs.

“…You with me? Hey, tell the on-call doc I think he’s awake for good this time.”

“Are you sure? We’ve played this game a few times before.”

“Positive. Thanks, Sharon.”

Padded footsteps retreat into the hall.

All lights have been shut off in what Callen finally recognizes as a private hospital room, except for one cozy owl lamp by the door and a light over the machines surrounding his bed. _So_ many machines.

Sunlight is more than enough to see, however, especially when his gaze roams over to a chair planted right in front of his bed.

It’s pretty comfortable looking as hospital chairs go: more of a mini recliner, stuffing oozes out of a coffee brown leather arm rest. Someone even threw a fleece blanket over the back of it and a steaming mug of tea sits on the bedside table.

Its occupant isn’t asleep. He’s leaned on one elbow, staring straight at Callen. This puts them at perfect eye level.

Crutches lie on the floor by his feet, leg bandaged with so many layers and a half boot that he looks like a mummy. Callen’s not much better, propped on his side and chest wound tightly to preserve whatever skin it has left. His right arm is in a sling to take pressure off that particular bullet wound.

Sam doesn’t speak again, just letting Callen acclimatize to the unfamiliar space and how his own body feels…or doesn’t feel.

But now that Callen has found those eyes, he can’t look away.

Despite his mouth buzzing with those bees, he tries anyway. “S’m.”

Sam’s fingers thread through Callen’s and he tears up, recognizing this instantly for the gift that it is when neither thought they’d get to do it again. The stars, the cosmos, are silent once more.

But he has Sam—and that’s a trade he’d make every time, no questions asked.

Sam, too, keeps his unblinking gaze on Callen. “G.”

That’s all they say for a long time. They listen together, feeling each other’s heartbeats, soaking it all in. Not long enough for Callen to doze off, but long enough for the pain to increase. Sam offers Callen some ice chips and they mute the bees for good. Gorgeous, arctic cold melts down his throat.

“Take it slow, G. Take it slow…”

Sam seems to be searching his face, for what Callen’s not sure. Callen himself is having trouble adapting to the fact that he’s not dead. That he’s not dreaming. This is _real._

“Agent Callen!” An older doctor enters and stops dead in the doorway, eyes wide. “I thought Agent Hanna here was pulling my leg about you being awake.”

Then he and Sam wait, nervous, staring at Callen without blinking. He feels a bit like a science project.

_Maybe they think my brain got scrambled instead of my lungs._

“Welcome to the land of the living and conscious, Agent Callen,” says the doctor finally, after an incredulous shake of his head. “Can you hear me okay?”

Callen pops a frail thumbs up, weaker than a newborn kitten.

“He’s coherent,” Sam confirms. “Answered to his name and everything. Said mine too, so no larynx damage like you were worried about.”

The doctor blows out a conspicuous breath of relief. “With the blood loss, we weren’t sure…well, let’s not dwell on that now. I’m going to do a vitals check, Agent Callen, if that’s alright with you.”

As if he has a choice. Callen nods.

When the doctor comes in and steps closer, Callen tries to pull away, preserve Sam’s dignity if he doesn’t want to be seen holding hands with his partner. But Sam’s grip tightens into a vice and his eyes flare a warning.

Callen swallows. This must not be the first time Sam has held his hand, as the doctor doesn’t even react to the sight, simply murmuring a ‘good morning’ to Sam.

“Can you feel this?” The doctor prods Callen’s fingers inside their sling with a tongue depressor.

“Sure can.” His rasp boasts a matching frailty, but the doctor and Sam still light up at the sound of it. His voice makes Sam’s mouth go wobbly. “Ouch, by the way.”

“Sorry.” Then the doctor sees Callen’s twinkle of amusement and rolls his eyes. “You secret op types are the worst to treat, you know that?”

“He wouldn’t know,” Sam snipes, “seeing as he never follows medical advice.”

“Ahhh.” The doctor quirks a knowing brow. “I’ve had my fair share of those patients. Though I have to say, I’ve never seen someone pull through a wound like yours.”

“Thanks,” says Callen. “I think.”

He asks about Callen’s pain levels, medication side effects, and explains that the swelling has gone down on both his back and skin, enough for an upcoming skin graft. Even the blisters have faded. A feeding tube in his stomach pumps him with nutrients to give his sensitive lungs and trachea time to heal, and when Callen looks down, even he can see that he’s lost weight. A stronger dose of medication is injected into his IV.

The doctor is oddly flushed while he fiddles with the needle, and Callen gets the sense that he’s in awe of being able to have this conversation with a very much alive Callen at all.

Callen can relate.

He promises to take the tube out and retrieve Callen’s rehabilitation specialist later.

“You and your team are a miracle, Agent Callen,” says the doctor, blunt, and then he’s gone.

This declaration doesn’t seem to surprise Sam. Callen has a lot of questions, about how long he’s been here, Kensi and Deeks, how they ended up in what looks like a US hospital, how they survived at _all_ …

But something grey lingers in Sam’s eyes, like the poisonous aftermath ash of a great fire, and Callen keeps his mouth shut. It’s the same look his partner wore after Michelle died and he went after her killer, heedless of due process. Tragedy and sorrow follow in its wake.

“You’re here,” Callen whispers.

Sam’s eyes pinch. “G…”

“We’re _both_ still here.”

Callen isn’t sleepy or groggy like other times he’s been in hospital. Judging by an unhooked ventilator in the corner, Callen guesses that up until now, possibly for travel, they were keeping him sedated on purpose.

There are pieces…fragments…not clear enough to hold onto as actual memories of being visited.

He’s not exactly wide awake either, alert enough to read the welling line in Sam’s bloodshot eyes. None of the tears fall, but that’s more of a knife twist in Callen’s stomach than if he acted hysterical.

Callen squeezes Sam’s hand.

At this tender pressure, a whisper of extra touch to the back of his knuckles, whatever Sam has weighed in his mind finally reaches a sum total—

“You gave up on me.”

The words are soft, spoken into a gauzy hush. As if raising their voices will result in this all being a dream and they’ll go back to Callen dead and Sam screaming at the world. _That_ Callen remembers perfectly well. It’s his last real memory of being on the dinghy.

Sam looks more devastated than disappointed. The ash falls in piles to create snowflake coffins.

At first Callen’s instinct is to make a joke, that it wasn’t _his_ choice to get injured and sent adrift at sea.

The hurt laced through Sam’s tone won’t allow it.

“Sam…”

“You stopped fighting.”

“I didn’t want to, but we had nothing to fight _for_.” Callen regrets the words instantly when Sam’s face falls. “There was no statistical likelihood of our being rescued happening so I faced reality and prepared for it. That’s my job. The fact we’re here at all is a fluke, right?”

Sam stays silent.

“Right?” Whisper-talking is a scratchy endeavour on Callen’s throat, but he forges ahead with brazen insistence.

It’s toeing at a line Callen doesn’t cross often, considering he doesn’t have all the information about what Sam has been through in the last…however long he’s been here.

But he won’t let his partner wallow, refuse to understand this responsibility that Callen shoulders, every single time they get called out into the field.

Sam looks away. “That blue whale, the one who surfaced by our dinghy, was tagged with motion sensors for tracking. When it bumped into something on the surface, researchers got a notification. It was a long shot, but Hetty convinced the Navy to investigate anyway.”

“The…” Callen’s thoughts blank for a second. “The _whale_ saved our lives?”

“I didn’t believe it at first either. Talk about a one-in-a-zillion long shot.”

And _there’s_ a story Callen would pay big money to hear in its entirety someday. It’s so far fetched he almost laughs. Eric will love it.

Then the first of Sam’s tears falls.

 _“You gave up on me_. _”_

Suddenly, Callen hears the real meaning behind these words.

He replaces the emphasis, not on ‘ _gave up_ ’…but on ‘ _me._ ’

Callen’s not sure what to do with all that it means, yet the boundaries of his heart creak in their attempt to hold this truth.

It won’t last, and perhaps that’s the point. Love is to be given away. To pretend he can hoard it for a rainy day is fallacy of the highest order and a disservice to Sam, no matter how much he pushed Callen away. 

“That’s my line,” Callen says, barely a breath. Because they’ve broken each other’s hearts, Sam in the months before this case, Callen on the dinghy.

“I’m sorry, G.”

Callen shudders, a motion scraped from his soul. “So am I.”

“Where you go, I go. Been doing some thinking and…from now on, I’m not leaving you on your own. No more trying to go it alone on either of our parts. You got that?”

Callen wants to jab at SEALs and their overextended sense of honour, but he just tugs Sam’s hand closer to his face. It lightly bumps his chin. 

Sam laughs, only it’s a wet sound and Callen shakes Sam’s hand to stop it at once.

“You meant it, what you said on the dinghy.”

Sam squares his shoulders. “Of course I meant it. And everything about what I’ve been trying to do is wrong.”

“We still need each other.” Callen scratches at his chest. “And that’s okay.”

Sam is silent for a minute. He looks out the window, then the hallway, then at a plethora of monitors over the bed.

“You died, you know,” he says.

Callen does know, for reasons he’s not sure he’ll ever be able to talk about. It’s something sacred, shored up inside the barren rooms of his heart for him to examine later. When Sam does not look like the one thing getting him out of bed in the morning suddenly vanished.

“We’re talking legally dead. Four times.”

“I’m right here.” Callen’s still whispering, in deference to his busted throat, but it makes Sam smile anyway. This is much better than the not-laughing.

Callen hates to burst it, knowing he has to ask.

Sam reads his disquiet without him having to say a word. “I’m sorry, man. It’s too soon to tell if the…the paralysis on your lower half is permanent.”

“Fluid build up? From the bullet?”

Sighing again, Sam nods. “It applied pressure on your vertebrae nerve endings when spinal fluid built up into a balloon around your spinal column. Just draining that without killing you took over an hour of your five-hour surgery time, let alone fishing Torales’ bullet out.”

The delay is one that would normally smother Callen with a pillow of shame until he asphyxiates on his own selfishness, but it is only then that he dares to think about Kensi and Deeks.

“Did they…their bodies…” Callen struggles to ask. “Any remains?”

Sam leans forward and flashes him another smile. “They’re alive, G.”

Callen pants out a shocked sound. He’s so dizzy he has to close his eyes for a minute. A rattled chuffing sound begins to fill the room and Callen realizes it’s _him_. Trying not to lose it.

“Maybe we should wait to talk about this, G. You need rest—”

“No, please. I have to know.”

Sam eyes him carefully. It’s the assessing gaze Callen has felt a thousand times on cases, out in the field.

“They’re both alive,” he says again, quiet.

“ _How_?” Callen demands, loud as he possibly can. Sam shushes him until the near-hyperventilating calms down. “I mean, we heard them get shot. And what about the explosions?”

“Both of those questions have the same answer—Kensi.”

Callen stares at his partner, trying to process this. The privilege of being alive at all hits him like it’s the very first time, a prisoner freed from a life sentence.

“She blew up Torales’ compound,” Sam declares proudly.

And Callen not-laughs too. “What a Kensi Blye move.”

“Yep. Told us the whole story on the plane ride home.” Sam adjusts the blanket where it’s fallen off Callen’s shoulder, a mother hen to the end. “She managed to overpower one of the guards by yanking her head forward, and with his hand still in her hair he fell head first down the staircase. Those two shots? That was her killing the guards with their own guns, G.”

Callen’s jaw drops. It’s unfair surprise, for this is Kensi—if anyone can use a disadvantage like being dragged around to overpower someone, it’s her.

“One of her bullets accidentally ricocheted off a barrel of gun powder hidden under tarps in the corner, a special kind used for making shrapnel bombs, and started a fire,” Sam goes on. “She put it out in a frenzy before realizing she could use it to escape and take Torales down in one.”

“W’s a big fire."

Sam laughs, for real this time. “It was a lot of gunpowder. Turns out Torales had a nice little rainy-day stash of it in the storage-slash-execution wing.”

“How much are we talking?”

“Somewhere in the ballpark of three hundred kilos.”

Callen can’t whistle but he huffs. “We didn’t do very much, did we? She saved the day.”

“No thanks to Kensi making homemade bombs with the stuff. After carrying Rhea and Deeks to safety far from the compound on a tarp—”

“Wait, wait, wait. They didn’t kill Rhea Carson?” Callen is prepared for any number of insane details in this story, especially since it’s Kensi they’re talking about, but Rhea making it out alive is not one of them.

“She was being held in her old cell with a live camera feed, as a last ditch bargaining chip to draw Hetty out. The thirty minute delay between Kensi escaping and those explosions was her saving their lives. She tried to come for us…but by then all the stairwells were burned. The place went up in smoke faster than Kensi expected.”

It sure did. Callen still can’t get over the carnage those bombs wreaked.

“She thought we were dead,” Callen realizes. “Just like we thought they were dead.”

Sam runs a palm over his bare head. “Yeah, she did. Nearly tore her apart to walk away and run for our original exfil spot. Help was already on the way by that point.”

“I’m glad she did. Deeks?”

Just his name is enough to sober Sam, chin dipped low. Eyes troubled.

The response makes Callen’s heart monitor beep faster. “Sam.”

“I told you, G. He’s alive and chatty as ever.”

“But…?”

Sam cants his head. “But they had to do reconstructive surgery on his face. His airways were completely closed over on one side and his brain wasn’t getting enough air. He nearly suffocated in his own blood, like you. Doctors aren’t sure…well, they’re not sure he’ll ever see out of his left eye again. The bone nicked his retina.”

 _Oh._ Callen blinks fast and something tickles his cheek. He absently wonders if there’s a spider on his face. The want throbs along with his injuries, to see his team. _We all went through surgery. And we all made it out of this ambush alive._

But only by a hair, and there is no swallowing this fact.

Sam says it for him—“Between Kensi’s crushed hand that may never flex properly, my leg, Deeks’ eye and processing delay, and your…well…”—then falters for a blinding second. Callen strokes a thumb over the back of Sam’s hand to get him talking again. It’s strange, hearing him do Callen’s job of voicing ugly truths. “We might never work another day in our lives, though they want to award Kensi the Medal of Honour for what she did.”

After this there is another drawn out silence, like an elastic band stretched too far. A dangerous silence. More tickles roll down Callen’s cheeks, splatters that warm his skin where it has chilled over the course of this conversation.

A low noise rumbles at the back of Sam’s throat before he reaches up to caress a hand over Callen’s jaw. He’s startled when Sam’s dark fingers come away wet.

More spiders wind salty webs across the stitches in his lip and a thunderous heartbeat where it roils under his flesh.

“We’re alive,” says Callen. “All of us.”

The words feel like a fairy tale. He half wonders if someone is going to waltz in and snatch it away, say _“gotcha!”_ and reveal that Sam’s an illusion of smoke who died long ago. That Callen is the only one left.

Sam just gazes at his partner. “Yeah, G. We are. And if Hetty has any say, we’re going to stay that way for a long time yet.”

“I heard you,” Callen breathes, and though it makes zero sense to anyone but him, Sam still wells up right along with him. “I _heard_ you.”

There’s no way to possibly convey what this means, the nuances of a near death experience that doctors would probably blame on his synapses firing all at once when his heart stopped. Maybe it wasn’t real or maybe it was.

For Callen did not just hear Sam’s voice, the one that stayed with him until it was all over—he heard who Sam _is_. He heard his clanging atoms and the music of his soul.

It’s a soul he can trust, with every puzzle piece of himself.

Sam does a very strange thing in reply.

The touch itself isn’t strange, for this is Sam and Callen has no secrets or mistrust around his partner anymore, but strange in that Sam has never done it before:

Starting from the wrist, Sam slides his other hand up Callen’s cheek. Sam avoids the gauze taped around Callen’s head, the matching concussion wound, to thumb at his ear, then the skin at the outside corner of his brow.

Callen stills. The slow touch circles across goosebumps forming along his temple. 

“I had an epiphany,” says Sam, his voice fragile but whole again, “when you stopped breathing the third time.”

Callen’s entire world comes down to that hand and brown eyes watching every twitch of his face. “Oh yeah?”

“I’m not losing you, G. Not for anything. And I realized…I’ve got a big boat, too much space for one person.”

It’s most certainly not, but Callen nods. “That thing _is_ pretty big.”

“Probably bigger than a ramshackle apartment over Deeks’ bar.”

“For sure. You’ve got more floor space than the average LA condo.”

A smug look steals across Sam's face at this outright lie, a half grin that just reaches his eyes. “How do you feel about barbecues?”

Another warm tickle webs across Callen’s face, but this one is on his lips and with it he feels like he could fly. The smile recharges his heart. “Only if I get to hog Eric’s sushi.”

“You’re an animal.”

“Takes one to know one.”

“I have no idea what’s going to happen next, what we’ll be able to do…” Sam’s face brims with affection. “But I don’t want to do it without you. How does napping on the coast sound?”

These words are kind of ludicrous, is Callen’s first thought. He just escaped dying in the middle of the ocean, so why on God’s green earth would he ever want to spend his days trawling around the sea?

But Sam’s eyes are a radiator of warmth and his fingers wrap around Callen’s like a promise and he doesn’t have to wonder if Sam wants him anymore, and that little half smile has at last stretched into the real thing, and this intentional callback to a life they didn’t think they’d get to live is doing funny things to his heart.

And suddenly…

Suddenly Callen hears it. The music is faint, barely there, but after what they just lived through, he’d know it anywhere:

That trill of approaching hope.

It’s _Sam._ It’s been Sam all along.

They’re in a hospital, both facing the very real possibility they may never walk again. They’ll be lucky to get a desk job, let alone be out in the field, and that’s not even counting the emotional wounds painted in lurid, dark shadows around their eyes.

Still, even still, Callen thinks that if it were night and all the lights of his room turned out, he’d still be able to see Sam. He is a light source, the bright star Callen has been navigating with from the day he began to realize Sam has no intention of leaving. That he will not walk away the second Callen becomes an inconvenience beyond salvaging.

The proposition, the offer Sam is extending here, rings around the room and Callen’s thoughts.

 _He wants this. He wants_ me.

It finally clicks that he’s crying, that Sam has followed these breadcrumbs too, faithful to the end. He wipes away a few more with a tender thumb under Callen’s eye.

Callen makes one last penny fountain wish.

The words warble around the room in harmony with Sam’s…

“I thought you’d never ask.”


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hetty bobs her head once, a military general surveying her troops—right before she stretches upwards and plants a kiss on Callen’s temple.
> 
> And that, well…
> 
> That he understands perfectly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This got a little longer than planned and thus I had to split it into two chapters. So there's one more small epilogue left. Thank you to everyone for your kind reviews! :)

‘Oh your lips taste the ocean  
For you’ve awakened to the sound  
Of your heart, of your life—  
Close now, hear whispers from a love  
That covers you tonight.’

“Covers You” ~ Future of Forestry

“Did you know old muscle cars run better on high-lead fuel?”

Kensi slides into the squished-together-hospital-beds set up next to her husband and switches off the bedside lamp. A spritz of delight feathers through her chest at such a simple ablution, one she’ll never take for granted again.

She’s done this a million times before, somehow always the last one into bed. Marty beats her there every time. Balled up tight, big blue eye locked on her face with such guilelessness Kensi thinks his smile might stop her heart one of these days. He’s a gift.

Then Deeks shuffles on the hospital pillow in an agitated motion and winces, ruining the illusion of normalcy. His stitches scrape before he levers away from the scratchy surface.

“Oh really?” Kensi plays along, stroking the area around his bandages.

Deeks jokes he looks like the Phantom of the Opera had a love child with Frankenstein, some areas swaddled in white gauze and others riddled with long, _long_ stitch lines down his cheek and across the bridge of his reset nose.

Kensi kisses him slowly, just because she can. He tastes of hospital food and mouthwash.

“Yeah.” Deeks smiles too, once the pain ebbs. Once he’s back in the present.

“What is it with you and cars lately?”

“I’ve been thinking…”

Kensi can’t help herself. “Uh oh.”

The one eye Kensi can see rolls. Deeks finds a comfy spot that doesn’t cause him pain. “Har har. No seriously. How does a road trip sound when this is all over? Once we can walk around for more than ten minutes without getting dizzy and your hand heals, I mean.”

Kensi stops her tender ministrations to really meet his eye. “A road trip?”

“Hear me out. We travel the coast, see San Francisco and Nell for a bit, then go all the way up to the Grand Canyon.”

“That’s quite a trip, Mr. Deeks.” Kensi props herself up on one elbow, her good hand. “And who do you suppose will do all this driving, since you’re legally blind at the moment?”

“You, duh.”

Kensi snorts. “We’re a regular Driving Miss Daisy act, are we?”

Deeks’ one eye glitters with life, warmth. He’s been oddly reserved about talking when it comes to what happened, mostly because he doesn’t remember all of it. Kensi’s grateful for that.

There is one thing he always asks, though. It’s almost a tic at this point—

“And Callen’s okay?”

A rush of compassion pools in Kensi’s stomach. “Yes, sweetheart. He woke this morning, remember? The doctor was so ecstatic he bought Sam a cupcake from the commissary. We just haven’t visited him yet because he’s resting and his breathing was agitated for a while.”

“Sam got to visit him,” says Deeks, a little petulant and a whole lot longing.

“Yes, but Sam is his medical consent. He had to be there for tests.”

Deeks ponders this for a moment, his mind slow in understanding and retaining information. They’re worried the delay will be permanent, but Kensi knows her husband is still in there, still himself no matter what avenue his brain finds to express himself.

His voice comes out cautious but even, repeating information they’ve reassured him with a dozen times. “Callen’s asleep, not unconscious anymore.”

“That’s right.” Kensi doesn’t mind the feel of stitches and moves to kiss him again. “You saw Callen yesterday. Right after Rhea and her father left from their visit with us.”

Marty thinks this over. His eye goes foggy, darting around while he muddles through the disjointed memories. “I remember now. I read him another car magazine.”

A laugh escapes Kensi before she can censor it. “Shopping for a mid life crisis car, honey?”

“You know it. If we’re on an indefinite vacation, then I want to make the most of it.”

“That sounds divine.”

“Really?” Naked surprise rings in Deeks’ voice. “You’re willing to spend a month with me in a car and crappy hotel rooms? I was half joking.”

Kensi hears the humour, the delight in them both at being able to laugh, at having each other at all.

Her eyes burn with tears, even though she hasn’t lost her smile. “If it’s with you? There’s no place I’d rather be.”

Deeks runs a bandaged hand through Kensi’s hair. She closes her eyes, savouring his touch.

They’re both weary, recovery slower than they thought it would be. They know one or both of them will wake from nightmares, just like they have every night since graduating from ICU to normal trauma patient. Deeks’ mind is finally piecing together what Torales did to his wife, to him, his anger at the torture and excruciating pain while they were forced to watch. They’ll both be exhausted and clingy in the morning.

But together.

Kensi finds that all other priorities have been brought to heel of this one. Nothing else really matters.

“Goodnight, Marty Deeks. I love you no matter where we go or what comes next.”

Already half asleep, his stubbly face brightens in a sloppy smile, teeth and all. “I love you too, Kensilina.”

* * *

The room smells like meatloaf from the nurses’ station out in the hall, apparently a hospital staple the world over.

It’s the only thing Callen _can_ smell. Well, not counting the chemical taste of oxygen being fed up his nose, placed there at sundown when his blood-oxygen levels dipped enough to make the good doctors nervous.

Callen dozed off, feeling like he weighs three hundred pounds in exhaustion, shortly after Sam left to get some actual food that wasn’t Jell-O (probably meatloaf) and have the orthopedic surgeon check his leg. 

It took some convincing, skittish as Sam is about Callen being out of eyesight now that he’s awake.

When Callen opens his eyes next, the cotton white of a full moon bathes the room instead of sunshine. Window blinds slice it into vertical stripes.

Moon and meatloaf. Callen’s mind takes a photograph of the odd picture and memory association they’ll make for later, years down the road when he eats meatloaf and is transported back to this quiet hospital room, with deadweight legs he can’t feel and salt staining his lips.

Another colour gets added to the mix—

A golden curl.

A whole _bush_ of golden curls.

Callen blinks as the curls bend to engulf his field of vision. He has to squint since doctors turned off all the lamps in this more isolated part of the ICU wing and whoever is bending over him blocks the moonlight.

More salt hits his cheek, but they’re not his tears this time.

“Deeks?” he guesses, who Sam has informed him is up and about—and irritating everyone since his doctor told him talking will ‘help with his neural recovery time.’ Callen barely has to imagine the glee on Marty’s face.

It’s not visiting hours either, not in the dead of night like this, so the possibilities make for a short list of who it could be.

The figure doesn’t answer, grabbing fistfuls of Callen’s scrubs near his shoulders. The hands quiver. Tremulous, wet sounds push out around a shallow breath. Twin moons flash in the dark.

A melting fizz froths out to the recesses of Callen’s limbs, as if he’s a bottle of pop and someone shook him until white bubbles fill his chest. They snap across the torn vista of his flesh in an achy, warm sensation.

Callen wraps his good arm around the bony shoulders. With the pulse ox clipped on his finger, he’s careful not to press too hard lest its sharp plastic edges dig in.

“Eric, hey. Missed you, buddy.” Just the sight of him—and Hetty, trailing along behind—is enough to confirm to Callen that he’s back on LA soil. His voice is soft and heavy with sympathy for the young man’s distress. “Hey, we’re good. I’m alright.”

The words send a shockwave through Eric’s body, an electrical jolt to both splinter elbows and the curve of his jaw.

He sniffles into Callen’s shoulder. It leaves a wet spot on his scrubs, not that he cares since it’s in exchange for the joy of being close to his people.

The young tech is also careful not to press into Callen’s bandaged chest, but he grips the agent with more force than normal. The fabric of Callen’s scrubs gets stuck under Eric’s nails, in the hinge of his glasses. They tug on Callen while Eric’s breath hitches.

“Callen, I didn’t, you—”

“Ssshhh. Easy,” Callen soothes, circling a hand on Eric’s unsteady back. He hasn’t been hugged with such intensity or for this long in years. The heated weight of Eric’s chest sends another fizzy propulsion down Callen’s arms. “We’re safe. No one’s dying anymore. You okay?”

Eric finally pulls back, though his glasses are a write off, fogged up and crooked on his nose. He yanks them off, tucked safely away in his shirt pocket. Not bothering with the visitor’s chair, he sits next to Callen’s hip on the bed.

“They wouldn’t let me see you today.” The words sound as if someone strangled them up his throat like the last globs in a tube of toothpaste. “I’ve gotten to hang out and debrief with everyone else, but you’re the only one still stuck in ICU. _Six days_ , Callen—that’s how long you’ve been out since they flew you back from emergency surgery on the SS Carmina near Hong Kong.”

“How long…?”

“You were rescued thirteen days ago.”

Callen opens his mouth to thank him for the information, but Eric steamrolls over top of his friend.

“You almost _died_.” He breathes out, hard, through his nose. This isn’t said in wrecked horror or a burst of tears—Eric is _furious._

The anger startles Callen, who touches Eric’s elbow until his eyes flit back to Callen’s face. Those are plenty wrecked, allowing Callen space to breathe. He _needs_ Eric to look human. Normal, the last bastion of civilian innocence left in their office.

“I had to stand there in ops and watch helmet footage of the exfil team finding Torales’ fortress up in flames. We thought you were all dead!”

“Did you see…” Callen clears his throat. “Did the medivac team have those helmet cameras?”

Eric scowls. “No. I had to hear about your dinghy fiasco over the phone from Kensi after the fact.”

 _Thank God._ Callen catches Hetty’s eye and sees mirrored relief. Those images, both him flatlining multiple times and Sam’s feral incoherency, will haunt the team for the rest of their natural lives; the less people to carry that weight, the better.

“I’m glad you woke up,” says Eric, hushed now. “That you’re alive.”

“So am I, Eric. So am I.”

Eric’s lips tremble, only once, but enough for Callen to understand the cost of this rescue mission. None of them made it out unscathed. Not for the first time, he wishes Nell was around, if not for his sake, although he misses her terribly, then to comfort Eric.

Hetty touches Eric’s other elbow. It’s a gentle brush of gentle fingers, followed by a nod.

This must be an expected cue, for Eric turns and sits in the recliner while scrubbing a hand over his eyes without another word.

A rolling stool has been left next to Callen’s bed for the doctor to sit on every time he examines Callen’s chest without either of them having to adjust. Hetty sinks onto it, looking ancient, and holds the lever until the stool rises to its highest setting.

Much like Sam, she doesn’t speak right away. Just studies Callen behind her owlish lenses, tie loose and crooked, no pocket square, her blazer wrinkled. Eyes lined. She hasn’t bothered with makeup.

Callen’s never seen her so disheveled.

“Mr. Callen, I…”

They both hold their breath for a moment.

“Grisha,” she starts again, and it does the same thing to Callen’s chest as when Kensi blurted his name. “I’ve said it to the others and now it’s your turn—I’m so sorry. We should have known this kidnapping was a trap for me. That Torales expected me to come personally and not my team.”

Staring at Hetty, a woman who has both had his back and manipulated behind it, Callen’s not sure how to translate these words. A funny beat of quiet lodges itself somewhere in the cue ball of his Adam’s apple. It wobbles there, precarious, before falling into the side pocket of his thoughts.

“You couldn’t have known, Hetty.”

Her smile is bitter. “We should have run better background on Torales, should have realized it was an alias and that he would hold a grudge against me all these years.”

The name comes back to Callen again. The memory of hearing it feels like it happened to someone else a lifetime ago, to a Callen who thought this failed rescue would end very differently. “The Vietnamese liberation force?”

“Mmm.” Hetty checks on bandages wrapped around Callen’s head. He knows it’s an excuse not to look him in the eye. “I used to work with a small band of American resistance fighters, who didn’t approve of their government’s actions overseas but couldn’t openly oppose the war either.”

“Torales was an enemy?”

Hetty adjusts her glasses. “On the contrary—he believed in our cause, to help Vietnamese people while stopping the senseless fighting.”

“Then why did he hate you?”

“He…” A hard edge gleams in Hetty’s eyes, something chilling, before it’s gone. Evaporated in the time it takes her to blink twice. “Hien Lee got captured by the enemy and branded for treason by his own people. Not only a prisoner of war, but a traitor for helping American operatives like Jerome Carson and I.”

Callen has heard enough stories like this to guess the outcome. “You couldn’t rescue him. And he’s blamed you, all this time.”

“We tried, see.” Hetty’s volume climbs. Then she glances at a red-eyed Eric and lowers it even further than before. Callen’s not sure why, since Eric saw all this and more through his digital digging and there’s little need for secrecy with Torales and his people dead. “We made every effort to extract Hien from the hole he was wasting away in, but it was impossible. I don’t know how he survived all this time, not to mention changing his identity and amassing such influence.”

That ‘hole’ is not metaphorical. The ambush begins to make more sense.

“This was about revenge, not power.”

At Callen’s matching whisper, Hetty at last makes eye contact. Her lips wrinkle between her teeth before she releases them and when they meet the air, for a split second they are as white as the moon.

Callen extends both of his hands. Hetty settles into the grip with the cold parchment skin of someone exhausted beyond their means. Her fingers are weathered and strong nestled inside Callen’s.

“None of us blame you for what happened.” He hasn’t talked to the rest of the team yet, but he knows there’s no other way they’d react to such an apology. “If anything, _I_ should have known something was wrong, that it was an ambush, and fallen back. You got us _out_ , backing up Kensi’s demands to check out the whale readings.”

“Mr. Callen.” Hetty slips one of her hands free to place it over Callen’s heart. “You are more precious than my job from now on, do you understand that?”

It seems like a non-sequitur, and Callen can only blink at first. He nods even though, no. He doesn’t understand. Why this should be such an important declaration for Hetty to make now eludes him. 

“Likewise,” she continues, “you should not have to put your country above your own health and needs.”

Callen smiles, broad and nigh unto a smirk, because he’s put everything and everyone above himself for so long that he’s not sure that what she’s talking about is even possible.

Hetty sees it, and her razor glare is back. Unyielding. Just like Kensi when she sets her mind to something.

“The paperwork for your indefinite sabbatical…or retirement, if you wish…has already been approved. You will never have cause to be separated from us or your family again. Do you hear me?”

In this, Callen does. This he understands like gravity and a pulsing sun, echoed by the moon. His priorities have shuffled with the grace of a card deck and landed squarely where they’re supposed to.

“Thank you, Hetty.”

Hetty bobs her head once, a military general surveying her troops—right before she stretches upwards and plants a kiss on Callen’s temple.

And that, well…

That he understands perfectly.

* * *

Kensi comes in sometime later, around three in the morning.

Unable to sleep, she’s woken to find Deeks vanished. Sleeping is painful for all of them but especially for someone who’s entire left cheek, eye, and head have been recently operated on. Just like Kensi with her burns, they’re treated and rewrapped almost five times a day.

Deeks’ absence doesn’t alarm Kensi, for she already knows exactly where he is, where he always goes—probably with another magazine in hand.

She waves to a few nurses in her quest down the hall. It feels a bit like that day on the aircraft carrier, hearing the evidence of Sam’s meltdown and racing to find him.

Now, she’s pleased at the fact she doesn’t need to rush. Her pulse is slow, her family is safe, and her injuries are quiet.

Once at Callen’s room, she sags on the doorframe.

If she thought _she_ was one for breaking protocol, then visiting the ICU of one of LA’s biggest hospitals in the middle of the night is practically a crime.

Not that Eric seems to care:

He somehow weaseled up behind Callen on the bed, probably because he’s skinny enough to fit there. Out like a light, he’s careful not to touch the bandage on Callen’s back but close enough that his hand is fisted in the tailbone of Callen’s scrubs. It breaks Kensi’s heart that Callen probably can’t feel this.

Sam dozes in his usual recliner that a doctor lent him from her office out of pity—also fast asleep. Cast propped on Callen’s bed.

Deeks is crimped up in the wooden visitor’s chair, feet in Sam’s lap, forehead on Sam’s bicep. Sam holds Marty’s ankles even in sleep, the other resting across his knees.

It exposes the shaved side of Marty’s head, the bizarre patch of creamy nothing where long, bronzy strands used to be to match the ones remaining on his right side. And even those are clipped short. It’s a sight Kensi hasn’t adjusted to yet and probably never will. Deeks is chaos and sunshine and hair in the wind. To see him without the unruly strands, well…it will take more than time to get used to.

Kensi is also shocked at the display of trust this position requires. With Deeks’ bandaged, ‘blind’ eye facing the room, something he never does now out of wariness, he counts on Sam to alert him if something goes wrong. His good eye presses into Sam’s sweater.

Despite size differences, the four men somehow breathe in perfect synchronicity.

“My boys,” Kensi sighs. It’s quiet enough not to wake them, though she spots a pair of keen eyes open and watching her.

Kensi goes to Deeks first, her hand smooth over the bristles of his head. She kisses Marty’s forehead, then his bare scalp. He murmurs in his throat at the familiar caress. Sam’s hand instinctively tightens around him. It bunches in the fabric of Deeks’ sweat pants until he calms.

Satisfied Deeks and Sam won’t wake up any time soon, Kensi then turns to Callen with a wink. A rolling stool has been left at his side, still warm from someone’s bedside vigil.

Kensi straddles it, lowers the lever, and walks herself closer. “Hey, tough guy.”

At her whisper, Callen’s grin widens. His left hand already hangs half off the mattress, as if in unashamed anticipation.

The Callen from two weeks ago would never have done such a thing. How far they’ve come, both physical and emotional distance. Kensi links hands with him, just like they did on the cell floor.

“Hey, sestra,” he whispers back.

And Kensi’s heart finally _breathes_.

“You’re awake. And we made it.” She laughs, stuttering over the inhale. Her sinuses sting in an implosion that vacuums all semblance of air.

Hand to the underside of her nose, she closes her eyes until the moment of breakaway emotion passes.

“It’s not our time yet.” Callen doesn’t offer Kensi a tissue or hush her for getting worked up now, _after_ the trauma is over. He just smiles at her and watches greasy strands of hair fall around her shoulders. Lets her release all the emotion she wants. “They were right—maybe we should take a lesson from the optimists.”

Kensi sniffs and glances at Sam and Deeks. The two men are their tanks of hope, always pursuing the best even when circumstances won’t let them.

It’s a freefall without a parachute, this whole wanting things business. _Good_ things. Things like being alive and retirement and a second chance. And the only reason they’ll make it safely to the ground is because they have people to catch them, people who on their own are not enough.

But their combined strength can stop even the hardest fall.

“It’s the only reason I kept fighting while being dragged away for execution,” Kensi confesses softly. “I knew it’s what Deeks would do.”

There’s an odd peace about Callen’s features, one she hasn’t seen in the many years she’s known him. It makes her wonder what he and Sam talked about in that private visiting hour after he woke up.

His good hand stretches up for her neck, the burn edges that peek out from thick bandages. Kensi’s right side took most of the brunt, and she knows she’ll feel the ghosted heat of that last explosion, while running away from the fortress and the barrels she set fire to, for as long as she lives.

With Callen’s hand shaky, Kensi helps hold it in place. His fingertips are rough, cracked where coral nicked them. But she grins at the touch.

Callen’s proud, wondering gaze floats over this kooky sleepover and their equally kooky friends. When Kensi puts her hand on Sam’s arm, the entire team is linked in one long chain of trusting, soul-dug love.

 _No_ , Kensi knows, _not a team—family. We’re family now._

They certainly were before this hellish experience, in all but name and blushing admission, but this cemented it beyond denying. Beyond a job prerogative. Kensi would not only gladly take a bullet for each and every person in this room, but she would _live_ for them too. Dying for someone is easy.

Being there for all the gritty struggles of their life is much harder. More rewarding too. 

Eric snuffles in his sleep, breaking Callen and Kensi out of the awed moment.

“I tried to rescue you and Sam,” she whispers. “The fortress was collapsing by the time I got Deeks and Rhea on the tarp. I jogged back, but the fire…there was so much screaming…”

Callen shakes his head. “You did exactly what I would have ordered anyway. You saved our _lives_. Thank you, Kensi.”

“You never have to thank me. I’d trade my job for you lot any day.”

“But I do owe you.”

“Stop that. No, you don’t. Steal me some of Eric’s sushi and we’re even.”

The throw-away words must mean something different to Callen for the way they make him light up, his face transformed into something mischievous and alert and excited.

It’s like seeing all the Callens who’ve ever lived and who will ever live layered over top of each other at once: preschooler Callen with a toy soldier in his hand, teenage Callen stealing his first car, freshly minted agent Callen, injured Callen, in love Callen, grieving Callen, retired Callen, old Callen, elderly and sated with years…

He laughs too, and at the sound Sam smiles without waking.

“How do you feel about boat barbecues?”


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam doesn’t find it in himself for a joke, just watching Callen’s face with the helpless gaze of someone who has so much love for another person that they don’t know where to store it all.
> 
> He palms Callen’s cheek. It too feels warm and safe. “Welcome home, G.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I so appreciate everyone who has come along for the ride, and I hope you enjoy this little denouement. 
> 
> Peace and love to you all!

‘Oh how I have stumbled through the path I took to get to you.  
“Be prepared to be surprised.” Opened my eyes when it was time,  
And you were standing strong and tall and unafraid to risk it all  
For the story that we found ourselves in.’

“What Have We Found Ourselves In” ~ Jess Ray

Sometimes Callen still feels the rocking.

Not the helicopter’s rocking, that transported him while saving his life; not the fortress rocking from Kensi’s chaotic, homemade bombs; not Sam rocking him in the hospital when he woke that first time.

Instead, on clear, cold nights when the stars are so bright they hurt Callen’s eyes, he closes them and feels that rocking of the dinghy. Gentle…swaying…so utterly quiet they might have drifted off into space.

He’ll feel it up to the moment he takes his last breath, he knows. 

Rocking. Living. Hoping for something better. It’s all the same in the end Callen is learning, a day at a time.

“Hey, pass me the mayo?”

Callen wakes from his reverie to feel that he’s sitting at a picnic table at the park instead of the dinghy. Surrounded by cheerful noise instead of the incessant ocean waves and a whale’s spray.

He smiles at Deeks, where he sits to the left of Callen’s wheelchair. “You mean ketchup?”

Deeks blinks—both eyes, finally. The injured eye is open now, exposed to the light after a month’s recovery time and reconstruction incisions having faded to red scars, but it’s milky and stays at half mast most days. Jagged strips of white scar tissue run down his brow into the duct of his eye, then across to meet the puckered trenches along his left cheek.

Just to see him without sunglasses is rare.

The expressive eyes light a match burrowed deep inside Callen, the part of him that essentially said goodbye to his friend on the cell floor.

Deeks thinks this over, hand paused around a hot dog on his plate. At least his hair has grown back enough to flutter ever so slightly in the wind, almost the same length as when they first met him.

“We don’t have any mayo,” Callen clarifies, patient. He has to raise his voice to be heard over Sam and Kensi’s bickering. “Remember?”

An animated discussion about whether to go gambling is already in full swing.

“Deeks and I are not stopping in Vegas on this road trip.”

“It’s an Americana rite of passage!”

“It’s stupid, is what it is.” Kensi argues around a mouthful of chips. She’s got her feet propped up and off to the side, bare toes huddled under Sam’s thigh, paper plate balanced on her knees. A precarious feat, specially with one hand in a fabric cast and still splinted to high heaven. “We’ll be lucky enough to _make_ it to Nevada, let alone Vegas or the Grand Canyon.”

“Don’t know what you’re missing.”

“Neither do you! Sam, admit it—you’ve never been to Vegas in your life.”

Callen ignores the childish voices in favour of waiting on Deeks’ thoughts to catch up with the present.

He mentally kicks himself when Deeks eyes condiment bottles placed amongst the heaps of food. (So much food. Callen half wonders if Mrs. Deeks and her stellar cooking are trying to kill them.) It’s a look they’re all starting to recognize, the slight parting of Deeks’ lips combined with furrowed brows their cue that he’s searching for a word.

Callen leans closer, hand on Marty’s arm to keep his drifting attention. “Did you mean mustard?”

Deeks snaps his fingers. “That’s it! Got mixed up.”

“Both words start with an M,” Callen says, in dead serious solidarity for the aphasiac moment. “Very confusing.”

He slides the bottle of mustard over to Deeks and grins at a generous glob he squirts on top of his hot dog. He’s the only one still working away at his lunch. Forget seconds—he’s onto thirds and fourths by now. Callen doesn’t know where his lean body puts it all.

“Besides, we’re not here because of this hypothetical road trip.” Kensi apparently decides she can’t win against a determined Sam and her best tac is to change the subject. “We’re here to celebrate Callen being free of the hospital today.”

Callen scoffs and points to his wrist, wrapped in a thick blue strip of plastic. Then his wheelchair. “Free? Yeah right. I’m on outpatient discharge.”

Kensi holds up her beer in a toast. “It still counts. To making it home.”

The four tap their bottles—non-alcoholic for Deeks and Callen on their particular medication—and smile at the clinking notes.

Sunshine feathers across their faces through the leaves of a broad oak tree overhead. Sam closes his eyes for a moment as if to better enjoy the feeling. Deeks hums a tune while he chews his hot dog and Kensi continues her attempts to balance the paper plate, now also attempting to braid her hair at the same time.

And Callen…Callen finds himself just glad that he can _look_ at them all, the faces of these people he never thought he’d get to see again, no matter how battered those faces might be.

The thought whispers to him again, that perhaps what happened was worth it in exchange for this breaking down of barriers.

It’s the most relaxed the four have been since they got home.

It’s also the first time in weeks they’ve been left _alone_ , just each other.

Psychologists have tried prying them apart, get them to stop camping out in each other’s rooms and sharing beds and having a hand on each other all the time. Spectacularly unsuccessful, to the doctors’ dismay. Even Eric doesn’t sleep well unless the team is within earshot.

There’s a thread to it, wound in shiny spools between their bodies. Sometimes Callen can’t sleep and feels claustrophobic, stuck inside his own body and legs that refuse to move. Without fail, every time this happens, Sam wanders in from his adjacent room. Be it the dead of night or ten in the morning.

Callen doesn’t know how Sam senses this so well and he doesn’t ask.

They sit together in silence until Callen’s heart calms, just holding each other’s hands. It’s the closest he’s ever felt to Sam.

Peace and independence are not always correlated. Callen could never conceive of admitting such a thing ten years ago. Hell, even _two_ years ago. Needing people was always seen as a weakness, something crippling.

He knows better now. Far better.

Callen decides he needs to shoulder Marty’s job for a while and say what needs to be said. “You guys can go on that road trip anytime you want. Don’t wait for us.”

Kensi startles, badly, spilling beer down her fingers. Deeks’ eye pops wider in surprise.

“He’s right.” Sam nods at Callen. “We know the only reason you two haven’t left is because you’re afraid to let us out of sight.”

Despite the angry denial in Kensi’s eyes, her lips quiver for a split second. She wipes a napkin down her hands.

“Kens?” Callen’s voice comes out soft. “You don’t have to keep watch over us anymore. Sam and I are healing and we have each other. Go live. Take some time off.”

“I’ll always worry about you,” she snaps back, but it lacks heat.

Codependence isn’t healthy, every textbook and every medical professional says. Callen agrees, if for no other reason than he’s watching it eat up their family in real time. A part of him rebels, doesn’t want them out of eyesight either.

But Kensi and Deeks need to find their solace too, soul weary as they are. Time to recharge together.

“It’s not permanent.” Sam backs up his partner with gentle words and a hand on Kensi’s ankle. “You’ll be back before you know it, and by then we’ll have lots of Tootsie pop wrappers to cover your desk with.”

A bark of wet laughter escapes Kensi almost before she seems to register it. The sound makes them smile…yet it also has a funny effect on Deeks. He shifts at Callen’s side.

Callen turns to him, ready to allay any of the usual confusion he has lately with following conversations. This wouldn’t be the first time he misses context and doesn’t understand how they switched topics or the emotional weight of a comment changes their tones.

But when they look, he’s beaming, an impish twinkle flashing in his eye. The sight takes Callen’s breath away.

They haven’t seen him like this in nearly two months.

“Marty?” Callen asks for them.

Deeks points to his wife. “You’re just scared I could own you at Texas Hold’em.”

Shock envelopes the table. Kensi’s jaw goes slack at the cheeky expression on Deeks’ face. The trio stares, to make heads or tails of this non sequitur.

Sam recovers first and holds out his fist. “Now that’s what I’m talking about! My man knows how to have a good time.”

Deeks fist bumps him, so pleased with himself for the jab he’s oozing with it.

Callen finally clues in that Deeks is contributing to the earlier argument, prompted by Kensi’s distress. He wanted to make her feel better. It’s the most in-character moment Deeks’ has displayed since they were rescued—water is wet and Deeks teases Kensi to cheer her up.

“Are you sure about that, Mr. Deeks?” Kensi wags a playful finger at him, even though her eyes are bright and she’s slumped on her elbow at the same rush of love they’re all feeling. “I was a poker champion at sleepaway camp.”

“You’re on.” Deeks says it without hesitation, completely in the present, and Sam fist bumps again. He’s a little bright eyed too.

The rocking hits Callen afresh, that unique sensation of being in a tiny, open topped boat and spinning off to worlds unknown. It’s life. And it’s theirs, all theirs.

He might not know where they’re going, but they’re squished up together in this boat.

Because of that, they’ll make it home, every time.

Kensi reaches across the table for Callen’s right hand. He’s pleased that he can feel her touch, lacking any nerve damage. “You’ll really be alright? Both of you?”

Callen flicks his eyes askance to his partner, only to see Sam already gazing at him with undiluted warmth. Lips flipped up on one side and the other unsteady with emotion. With hope. With fountain springs of promise. 

The expression is a preview of coming attractions, based on the vow made in that hospital room of being able to lean on each other and not drop.

A slow smile creeps over Callen’s face.

He answers for them both: “I think we already are.”

* * *

_‘I love him – his shoulders, his angular, stooping figure – and at the same time I see behind him woods and stars, and a clear voice utters words that bring me peace…taking the road that lies under the high heaven, seldom sorrowful, forever pressing on under the wide night sky…’_

* * *

Footsteps hustle closer, place something down with a _cler-thunk_ , then retreat. Their owner hums a tune along with a popcorn radio, static crackles accompanying the old Armstrong song. A trumpet solo wriggles through the air with aplomb.

Callen murmurs himself awake. “At least it’s not improvisational jazz.”

“Would you shut up?” Sam says without missing a beat. “You wouldn’t know good music if it proposed to you.”

Callen smiles, his eyes still closed. He enjoys the rocking under his spine and worn plushness of the couch, the homely smell and sound of fish cooking on the stove. Sunlight streams through panel windows above him, turning his cozy spot into a sliver of paradise.

The familiarity and ease of this is, dare he say it, domestic.

A very unorthodox domestic, granted. But there’s something _safe_ about the sounds of Sam puttering around that makes Callen’s heart leap out of hiding.

“Where are we this time?”

At one time in his life, Callen would feel very squirrely even having to ask that question. Control equalled survival. If you had to trust someone else to take you places, then you were asking to get taken advantage of.

Now, Callen relishes the feeling of Sam steering the boat while he naps. He wakes to different places and sights each time. It’s the same sensation a child gets when handed a gift, that upwell of anticipation right before the wrapping paper is torn into.

Sam murmurs a fond and amused sound. “See for yourself.”

Callen does, opening his eyes on another cloudless day, sun at its peak. Through the windows above, he gets a glimpse of…palm trees? They sway in a strong afternoon breeze.

So far this month, they’ve been cruising along up north, to see the Canadian tail of the Rockies. They began trekking their way back down two weeks ago, hoping to cross the Canal and go up along the Atlantic later in the year, but Callen hasn’t seen palm trees in ages.

Absently, his hand travels to his chest, the funny, tight places where a skin graft put him back together again in what seemed to him a barbaric process. Eight months hasn’t been nearly enough time for it to feel like _his_ skin.

Sam walks by again in an apron, one hand on his cane and the other flipping fresh-caught tuna in a frying pan. “Hey! Doc said no scratching.”

“Worry wart.”

“I heard that!”

Callen smirks. “At least we know your ears still work.”

“You’re lucky my hands are full.”

Callen sits up, shedding the blanket, and reaches for his own crutches, a necessary evil in this mobility rehabilitation process. He’s just grateful he can feel his legs at all now. That their physiotherapists agreed to _let_ Sam and Callen go away for a while, doing the exercises on their own without regular check-ins.

As predicted, he regained sensation in his lower half once the swelling went down, though his nerve endings are taking their good sweet time re-learning how to send command signals. Some days they don’t want to bend or flex.

Even the slightest fine motor skill takes sweat-level effort and many mornings Callen can only lay there until Sam gets up for the day, kneeling beside the couch with a commiserating look. A hand will smooth across the short thicket of his hair, in tandem with a squeeze to his shoulder.

From what Callen can tell on video chats, Kensi is fighting the same battle with her hand. They all cried when she proudly picked up a piece of string and knotted it. It’s led to a strange show-and-tell process on each call—just last week, Sam walked ten feet without his cane.

Sam must see the grimace. “It’s only been eight months since hospital discharge, man. Have some patience. You’ll be as good as new in a year or two, just you wait.”

Winding up for a sharp comeback, Callen remembers his conversation with Kensi. Its cool balm douses his pessimistic fire. “Yeah…yeah, you know what? You’re probably right.”

Sam nearly drops the pan. He stares at his partner, eyeing the crutches. “Are you feeling lightheaded? Did you just agree with me?”

Callen nudges him while hobbling by. “Don’t get used to it.”

“We’re docking in an hour—prepare for the welcoming committee.”

Those melodic strains well up inside Callen, there almost any time he stops and reflects for even the briefest minutes. It’s almost a refuge, the chance to stop and listen to what it’s all saying.

He looks out at LA’s skyline through the front windows. “Another barbecue?”

“Kensi and Deeks finally finished their never-ending road trip. They have some big announcement for us.”

Callen whips around to catch Sam’s eyes, which are already a tad shinier than they should be. That conversation on the dinghy might as well have happened seconds ago for how fresh it is in both their minds. “We’re gonna be the best uncles ever.”

Sam doesn’t find it in himself for a joke, just watching Callen’s face with the helpless gaze of someone who has so much love for another person that they don’t know where to store it all.

He palms Callen’s cheek. It too feels warm and safe. “Welcome home, G.”

And he’s not talking about LA, not even about this boat or their retirement plans on it. Callen knows they have a long way to go, all four of them with decisions to make about whether this retirement is permanent, Hetty’s offer of a desk analyst job, relationships, Anna, how to cope with injuries they’ll never fully heal from.

But the tidal wave of crossing some invisible finish line swells inside Callen’s chest.

He sees the future unravel before him, exactly the way they lived it on the dinghy. Each thump of his heart aches in sanguine detail, the gratifying kind of ache that makes him feel like maybe everything is exactly the way it was intended.

Only then does Callen glance at the gift Sam set out on the coffee table, directly in his eye line from where he lay on the couch.

It’s a simple round vase—

Inside, cradled by sunlight and promise, is a purple lilac.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written August - December 2020.


End file.
